Wow, thanks everybody! I was confident Dynamic Ecology would get off to a strong start, and did everything I could to make it happen. But I never expected this: 1502 pageviews on the first day! That’s almost five hundred more than we ever got on a single day on the Oikos Blog (and indeed, today set a new record for the Oikos Blog).
You have no idea how thrilled I am. 🙂 Thanks so much for reading–I’ll do my best to make it worth your while.
Dynamic Ecology 
Love reading your posts. Not a fan of the huge double-size banner at the top of your new blog. Too Much Scrolling. Can you make the white part a lot smaller? Better yet, can you overlay the text in the white part over the fox picture? And the fox pictures are beautiful, but I go to your blog to read the content, not look at pictures… so I wouldn’t mind if the picture got smaller too…
I was wondering if anyone would comment on that. The difficulty with shrinking the header images is that it’s a width-height ratio thing. I’ve already cropped many of them to make them as short as possible relative to the width. If I crop them further they’ll look bad. Most of them are indeed taller than WordPress recommends, but they were so pretty I couldn’t resist. But I’ll see what I can do. Maybe I’ll start with dropping some of the tallest images from the rotation.
I can’t really fiddle with the size of the white areas, that’s the theme default. I also wish the post font size were a bit smaller, it’s really too big for the lengthier posts. Or the pop-up banner at the bottom of the page, which identifies the theme and appears whenever you scroll down. But again, I can’t change those things. I looked at various themes and liked this one best. And I’m too cheap to pay money for a custom theme. 😉
You can almost certainly shrink the white area by fiddling a little with the HTML. (I know, I know.) Ditto the post font size. And the pop-up banner at the bottom (which I hadn’t even noticed until you mentioned it). And you could deal with your banner images by padding the sides with black (or white) space to preserve the ratio but make them shorter. After all, your text width is a lot narrower than the banner width, and you don’t really need the image to span all the way across as far as it does. My opinion is that you should be able to see the start of a post’s text without scrolling. And with yours, I can’t even see the title. My two cents.
Sorry, to do any of those things I’d need to pay $30/year to WordPress to access the CSS files. I may yet decide to do it, but like I said, I’m cheap. You need to recruit some more people to tell me to do it. 😉
Ok, I’ve dropped the tallest images, except for two. I love the fox hunting the mouse too much; I like to think of the mouse as a zombie idea. 😉 I love the fox sneaking up on the beagle too, it’s such a great metaphor for the contrarianism and imagination I like to attribute to myself. 😉
Unfortunately, dropping the taller images means dropping the various drawings, which besides being lovely were a self-deprecating counterweight to the other images (they illustrate Aesop’s Fables in which foxes get their comeuppance).
Like the rest of the blog, the header images are a work in progress. Reader feedback is how things get better.
Depending on how the blog develops in future, the still from “The Fantastic Mr. Fox” may end up being the most appropriate header image. Not because I myself am fantastic, but because it shows Mr. Fox leading a group of his friends…
(Also, not to be a buzzkill, but all the extra pageviews might be your usual crowd hitting “refresh” so we can look at all your different fox pictures…)
Anything for traffic! 😉
Who said anything about reading? Nice stuffed animal pictures though….
Ah, there you are Jim! Thought I was going to have to send out a search party.
My periodic need to make comments of dubious worth or relevance in public fora devoted to topics on which I know very little brings me ’round eventually.
Anyway keep up the good work. If you don’t we will have to let you go.
If only you’d actually publicised or linked to the new blog from the old one, you might have caught even more readers!
Anyway, great to see you’re settling in nicely, looking forward to lots more great content. I’d like to see some of your own hand drawn foxes in the banner, please.
There was a time when I could draw from life quite well, but that time is long gone, sadly…
I’ll warn you – looking for the perfect wordpress theme is fun. So fun that it will suck an afternoon away from you. Just sayin’. (but it is fun!)
Like I said, I already searched the themes a bit. Themes I liked even a bit were “thin on the ground”, as the British say. If I do decide the theme really needs to change, I’ll probably break down and shell out the $30/year.
Is there no “like” button here? 🙂
Yes, there is a “like” button, as well as buttons to share posts via Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus. But they’re on the pages for the individual posts (click on the post title), they don’t show up on the main page. Oikos Blog was the same way. I’d actually like the buttons to show up on the main page too, but I don’t think I can do that unless I shell out the money ($30/year) to get access to the CSS files.