I consume most of my blogs through RSS readers–my favorite is Feedly (it generates my Google Reader-subscribed feeds in a magazine-like format on my phone, tablet, and/or desktop). Needless to say, I’m one of those people who is always shocked when I see a post along the lines of “Hey readers, we’ve got a new design around here!”

But hey, readers, we’ve got a new design around here! And a new mascot, who needs a new name. We’re turning to you for that. Check out the sidebar for our “Name That Owl” contest which will run until Friday at 9am ET. This is also a great opportunity to create an account on Intwischa–which you can now do using your Google or Twitter account! (UPDATE: Due to low participation, polls are now open! Ballot stuff away!)

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Props of Many Natures, All Quite Mad

First things first, mad props to fellow author BryanMD for our new logo. Bryan came up with the owl logo within a few days of me making this comment: “An owl is the symbol of Athena. If Intwischa were to have a patron goddess, it seems like a good candidate would be the goddess of wisdom, inspiration, mathematics, strategy, the arts, and skill; the champion of heroes.” Hats off, man.

The people behind the Arras Theme for WordPress deserve recognition as well. Our new theme was originally going to be a child theme of Arras; however, when we realized that over 10% of our readers used mobile devices, we decided to move in the direction of a responsive theme. I notice that Arras is working on a new design, and a responsive one at that; it always stinks when you can save yourself tons of development time by simply waiting the same number of months to see a quality project like Project AR2 (the codename for their new responsive theme).

Speaking of responsive themes, thanks to the folks at Zurb for their Foundation framework, which drives this theme. Again, Zurb was hard at work while we were developing this theme and came out with a new version. Having worked with both, I can say that Foundation 3 is an order of magnitude more awesome than 2. And if you think that sounds harsh to Foundation 2, then let me just say that, before I played around with Foundation 2, I was a Sivapithecus playing with a bone.

I’m a small fish in a big pond when thanking the likes of WordPress for their fine blogging platform, but it is still awesome to see the de-facto standard in blogging be an open-source product. (Actually, given that Project AR2 is GPL’ed, it’s sweet to note that all the links in this are to open source products!)

Thanks for reading. Please comment, tweet, or email any feedback!

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