Welcome to the all new Chewing Pixels.

There’s not really any kind of anniversary being celebrated here (unless you count the fact we’ve been going for, um, two years, three months and thirty days) but a spruce up was well-overdue.

Let’s take a moment to write you through what’s what. These things are self-explanatory but then, so is a house and people still take you round that when they get a new one.

To start off with, let’s answer the question of any number of people have asked over the last two years: the original Chewing Pixels header was drawn by Japanese artist Yusuke Nakamura.

He’s the best of the artists and so it seemed natural to use another of his drawings for the redesign. Go here or visit his super unfriendly-to-navigate Japanese art sites to see some of his work.

I would happily enlarge, frame and hang anything he’s ever done in my house.

There’s been a little photoshop jiggery-pokery but, Gameboy aside, this is all his work. Click the header at any time to return to the front page. Neat, eh? We e-mailed Nakamura-san last week to see if he’d accept a commission to create a bespoke piece of art for the site header (for money and everything – patronage ftw) so, if he gets back to us with a positive, then there’s a chance it could all change again.

In the meantime though, this is what you’re getting: it’s an image from some of his work for Japanese rock band Asian Kung-Fu Generation. They’re an orthodox J-rock band (gamers will recognise their work from Nintendo DS, rhythm-action firework, Ouendan and, I think, Naruto) – so no moody Mono-style clouds, cello and apocalypse here. Nevertheless, they’re, well, alright and having Nakamura as their official graphic designer gives them a +50 to their awesomeness stat.

Over on the left of the page there’s a new sidebar. In the now-butchered PHP it’s imaginatively called sidebar2. It’s home to the Halliwell’s Four-Star Film links, the set of pages which, thanks to Boing Boing, has drawn in more readers over the site’s history than anything else, despite being the only thing I didn’t ‘create’ myself (other than copying out of the book). *sigh*.

Below that is the ‘blogroll’, as wordpress calls it with uncharacteristic ugliness. These are places I have in my google reader and, if you like reading this site, then you should probably read them too. Underneath that is a list of people/ organisations I’m currently working for in some capacity or other. Below that again is my google ads panel, from which I’m yet to earn a dollar. Oh, mid-noughties monetisation naivety…

Then over on the right hand side is the new streamlined Sidebar1: the original, fittest and strongest of the sidebars. In the uppermost section you can read about me, the author and how I’ve been underachieving through life thus far. Under this is a list of the categories into which Chewing Pixels’s 646 posts (!) have been slotted.

Under this again is a list of the ten most recent comments. In 2008 you, dear readers, have been a lot more vocal than in the past, which is brilliant. Keep it up. I like hearing what you have to say, as I’m sure do other people who visit. Even though this is the Internet, you’ve occasionally changed the way I’ve thought about something so take heart, it’s not all just shouting into the black void.

Underneath that is a list of the most popular posts based on click-throughs, google searchs and a bunch of other stuff that the plugin does to work these things out. Rather depressingly, the most popular post here is about adverbs. This website’s not really worked out the way it was meant to, has it?

Sinking lower and there’s a bunch of stuff I think you might like: Alan Moore comics, a pixel-art website, oh, and that Newsnow image you have to display for them to send your ‘news’ out to the world. Below that is a cute little box that shows what, if anything, was posted this day last year and, underneath that it all gets too boring to even continue.

If you have any comments about the redesign, things that you don’t like or, especially, things that don’t work on your browser properly, then please leave a comment below. If there’s a totally sweet plugin/ widget we should add to the sidebar (1 or 2, take your pick!) then pipe up and, if you would like to have your site added to the ‘Read These’ list then introduce yourself and maybe we can be ‘blogroll’ friends. No promises or touching, though.