You may be wondering what on earth has happened to Dayorama.

If you've joined us any time in the past two and a half years, you will have got to know Dayorama in its third incarnation - grey borders, panels, stretched picture at the top, purple logo and little pictures of all the authors.

That design took shape back in July 2005 when I was frantically trying to find something, anything, that would take me away from revising for the final exams of my degree.

As I knew then, and have been discovering all over again in the past week, re-designing a weblog is incredibly time consuming and becomes a labour of love in which your head spins with bits of code remembered, gleaned, stolen and bodged together.

The result, which you see in front of you now (hopefully!), is Dayorama version four. It's been around four days of solid effort in the making, with a couple of days' designing before that, and this is what is new:

1. This is Dayorama's foundation stone. We are very proud to have been blogging for over five years, longer than many on the web, and this block commemorates our establishment in August 2002.

At the same time, I have incorporated a Twitter feed into the foundation stone, so that we can update the stone's message at any time, anywhere in the world. Look out for snappy slogans, quotes and observations that won't make a full post but deserve an airing, plus important messages.

The traditional Dayorama logo, in Showcard Gothic font, has been a fixture since version two (2003). The only change here is a barely noticeable tweak to the shade of purple.

2. Dayorama would no longer be Dayorama without the revolving pictures at the top of the page, a feature since version three. The original set of photos got an update this time last year, so I've refreshed the set again, with 14 new banners on random rotation whenever a new page loads.

3. Version three also introduced the now-familiar colour schemes for authors - green for me, light blue for OJ, ultramarine for Amy, and gold for David when he joined in September 2006.

They stay in version four, but the pictures of the authors have gone (you can find out what we look like on our individual pages - see below).

What we do have is a new font. Trebuchet is now font of choice for the headline and several other bits of the design. You'll notice we no longer use categories, either. They're just so 2004.

4. Version two had a purple background, version three had grey, so what about version four? Well, I couldn't decide, so you can choose. Click any of these little boxes in the top right hand corner of the page to change the background colour accordingly.

5. Each of our authors now has a new page about themselves, with a photo, which you can get to using the sidebar. All the usual information like recent posts and the 'on this day' feature are now on the left - the posts themselves have swapped sides!

6. Further down the left hand side of most pages you will find Dayorama's Flickr stream, showing a selection of photos from our Flickr account. Click on any photo to be taken to a larger version.

7. One of the quirks of the last design was that I definitely had a decent-looking search results page somewhere, but then it disappeared, so that whenever you tried to search for something, you ended up with a bizarre-looking purple leftover from the version before last.

This time the search button works properly and takes you to pages in keeping with the rest of the site, should you want to find anything.

(During testing I discovered there is practically nothing we haven't covered. 'Squirrels' was bound to generate results, but I was impressed when 'cardigan' and 'heffalump' both produced the goods as well!)

8. Beneath each entry there's a reminder of the author and a permanent link as per previous versions, but there are also some new features.

Stars of the social networking universe can now share our posts with friends on Facebook, or alternatively submit our posts to the wider world using the Digg website.

Finally - and this, I hope, will be one of the biggest improvements - I have overhauled our comments system.

If you've ever tried to leave a comment before, you won't need me to tell you that the window almost always crashes when you click 'submit', leaving you unsure whether your comment has worked or not. Most people submitted each comment up to five times in the hope of making sure, when it always worked first time round, but looked as though it had all gone wrong.

This, coupled with a bucketload of spam comments at our end, made the whole process of comments a bit of a nightmare. So I've been plugging away at it and now the comments system should be much easier to use.

Click the 'Comments' link from the main homepage or an archive, and it will take you to the comments section of the page dedicated to the entry in question. Write your comment and click submit, and we'll tell you if your comment made it or not, and if not, why not. Touch wood, the page won't just fall over and die, leaving you guessing!

You know what, why not try it out now. Tell me what you think of the new look using the comments, and we'll see if it works or not. Call that the acid test.

Anyway, I hope you approve, and if not be sure to let me know as it's never too late to change things. Thanks as ever for visiting Dayorama and stick with us in 2008. Coming up shortly will be my look ahead to next year, and I might just find time, after all that coding, for a Dayorama zeitgeist. Cheers!