We are currently a couple of months into a total redesign of Walking Barefoot. It is over two years since we launched version 9 and we are planing a whole host of cool new features and enhancements for version 10, we will have more on these changes in a few months time when the site launches.

In the meantime as a result of the redesign we are in the process of making a few changes to the backend of the site, some of which you may already have noticed. One change we have made is to move all our RSS feeds over to feedburner.

While this will offer many benefits in the long term, in the short term it will mean that the url of all our feeds has changed.  If you used our feeds before you will need to update your links to point to our new feeds which are listed below. If you haven’t used our feeds before be sure to grab them and add them to your RSS reader of choice. All the current feeds are listed below:

• Walking Barefoot News
• Walking Barefoot Comments
• News Snippets
• Flickr Group

This will be the last post of 2007, so just wanted to say a very merry christmas and a happy new year to everyone from all of us at walking barefoot.

We have created a new section of the site dedicated to information about the bands currently untitled fifth studio album. The page contains information about all the tracks being recorded from bassist Mark Hamilton, as well as photos, video clips, press interviews and articles.

Be sure to bookmark it as it will be constantly updated with the latest news and photos.

Just a quick note to say that updates may be a bit a bit sparse in the next few weeks, I’ve recently moved house and currently have no internet access so i am having to rely on the good nature of friends and relatives. Updates will occur whenever I can get access. The same goes for emails to, so please be patient while waiting for a reponse

It hard to believe that its five years today since walking barefoot first launched, nine versions later and were still going strong, here’s to the next five. Thanks for all your support and help along the way. It’s been fun.

So here it is, a detailed look at what’s changed in the new version and where were heading. It’s hard to believe that its coming up to five years since we first launched Version 1 back in August 2001. The site’s grown and grown a lot since then and continues to eat up more space and bandwidth. I hope you like the new changes and appreciate that redesigning a site as huge as this is a big and time consuming effort for one small man, please be gentle with your comments.

There’s is still a lot more tweaking and work to be done so please consider this version of walking barefoot as a working beta until I say otherwise, and tread carefully while I correct and test things further. In the meantime things may get a bit ugly in certain browsers, until more testing on different platforms and browsers can be done I just ran out of time. The design itself also isn’t finalised and will keep changing and tweaking as the weeks go by, and loads more content and pictures still need to be added. Here’s a detailed look at the changes we’ve made and why.

The Theme
I wanted a clean, simplified, easy to read/navigate layout. So I decided to strip it back a bit. We’ve gone back to the grungy 1977 era colours, as it felt appropriate now that Ash have returned to a three piece once again. The idea is to give the new walking-barefoot more of a community feel and vibe to it and make it a more friendly place to visit, so we’ve added numerous features that allow you to add your input and feel a part of things.

Flickr
Walking Barefoot invites you to contribute your Ash related photographs to our flickr pool. Anybody can add photographs to Flickr quickly and easily, marking them with descriptions and tags so they can be archived correctly and retrieved at a later date by other visitors. Please feel free to add your Ash photos to our pool.

Last.fm groups
A lot of you will already be aware of last.fm, well we’ve set up a walking-barefoot group page on there so you can see what other fellow Ash fans are listening too. I always find this a great way to find out about different bands by studying what others with similar tastes in music to you are digging at the moment. Head over now, sign up for an account and then join our group.

Del.icio.us Links
This is a selection of Ash related links and snippets from around the web and has it own RSS feed so be sure to subscribe to it, its powered by the powerful bookmarking network del.icio.us

Wordpress
Walking Barefoot news is now powered by Wordpress rather than Movable Type and I’m still in the process of learning all the nuts and bolts to it, a few pages, such as archives and 404 pages still need to be sorted.

Gravatars
Following on from the above, we now support Gravatar via a Wordpress plug-in. As I said I wanted to create more of a community so comments have been spruced up and now support gravatars, this enables posters to be instantly recognisable my displaying an image just like on a forum. If the commenter doesn’t have a gravatar account a default image is displayed instead. Be sure to sign up for an account.

RSS Feeds
RSS feeds have also been spruced up, note the various feed icons around the site. Please note all RSS feeds URL’s have changed so you will need to update your news feed reader accordingly. We also offer several more feeds, including a del.icio.us and comments feed.

Customisation - Your The Designer
We now have a new customise section in the footer allowing you to change and view any page to meet your specific needs, for example you can make the font size larger or smaller or get rid of the sidebar and let the text float the whole width of the page. The good thing about the customisation is that through the use of cookies your selection is saved, so every time you return to this site your preference is automatically remembered. To return to the default setting simply hit the default link. Please remember to set your browser to accept cookies for this feature to work as intended. This will evolve in the future as more customised designs become avalialbe.

New Print Style Sheets
Thanks to the wonder of CSS we now have new print style sheets that will help you save a lot of ink when printing pages from this site and will also make them more readable and easier to read. This is automatically on so you don’t need to click a print this page button as in previous versions.

I will give a detailed list of the work still to be in the coming weeks.

Stay tunned, I hope you like the changes.

At last I hear you scream, Version 9 of Walking Barefoot is finally here. At the moment its still a beta launch so please tread carefully, more testing and tweaking to come. A detailed look at what’s changed and why as well as where were heading will be posted in the next few days, for now I’m to tired, I’m gonna have a lay down. Enjoy!

UPDATE:: Don’t worry these updates are coming, I’m currently in the process of moving house and things are getting a bit hectic

A new version of walking-barefoot.com (version 9) is set to launch in the coming weeks, boasting a complete make over, with a more minimalistic look, prepare yourself for something a little bit different. We’ve been working on it since January so I hope you like it. I’ll also be updating those pages which have been collecting dust over the past few months. If you have anything to contribute as always please feel free to send it in. The site may go down for a few days during the transistion so please bear with us.

Finally I have also decided to intentionally hide all CSS from Internet Explorer for Mac this time around, as I felt all the hacks and limitations were holding me back, its time to move forward, IE for Mac hasn’t been updated since 2001. So if your still using Internet Explorer for Mac and wish to view the new site as intended be sure to download the latest version of Firefox or Safari in the coming weeks.