Jay Meydad's Life Mashup

One of my new year resolutions was to refresh the design of this blog with a new theme. I am happy that it took me less than a month to complete it and get it off my task list.

I am now using the stylish iNove theme, created by mg12. I like its simplicity, cleanses and how it brings the content to the front. I also find the RSS button implementation very cool (hover over the button to see it). Hopefully it will get more people to subscribe to this blog and consume my thoughts regularly via RSS readers or email.

I kept only the essential widgets on the site in order to shorten page load time:

• Twitter badge shows the number of followers I have on twitter (if you are not one of them, now it is a good time to do it) and the latest twits.
• MyBlogLog gives me information about the community who reads this blog
• Disqus powers the comments and integrates very well with this theme and Wordpress
• Outbrain lets you rate my posts and provide feedback that helps me improve my writing over time
• And of course, all external hyperlinks are enhanced using the product we have created at Snap – SnapShots
• For analytics I use both SiteMeter and Google Analytics.

The last credit goes to Alex Sirota, founder of FoxyTunes, who took my portrait picture that is displayed at the top right corner.

I hope you will like like the new design as much as I do.

Congratulations to the founders of FoxyTunes – the Sirota brothers, Alex and Vitaly, for getting acquired by Yahoo and joining the Yahoo Music group.

This deal is yet another example that a great engaging product, millions of downloads and presence on the desktop/browser, a passionate community of users around it, and a strong team, are the keys to success and a very valuable asset to any company.

More on TechCrunch, VCCafe, TheMarker (Heb) and the.co.ils (Heb)