This redesign is something that I’d been thinking about for quite some time, as the site was looking a bit tired and out-of-date. Not much on CBN had been changed in the look-and-feel department since the site was launched in late 2008, and WordPress theme design has come a long way since then.

Even so, I still wanted a layout that was fairly clean and elegant, and I think I found that with BloggingNews, a premium WordPress theme from the folks at Colorlabs & Company. Unlike themes I’ve used in the past here and on other sites, this one didn’t require much hacking to get it to do what I wanted, and I highly recommend it – or one of Colorlab’s other themes – for anyone looking to launch or revive a WordPress site.

(And by the way – the paragraph above is not a paid endorsement, just praise from a happy customer.)

As for the most important aspect of this site – the content – there won’t be any major changes there. CBN will still remain the most timely and comprehensive source of beer and brewing news in Canada, with new posts starting up again first thing tomorrow.

In the meantime, please excuse any glitches that you might find as I put the finishing touches on the site, and let me know what you think of the new look.

cheers,
Greg Clow
Publisher & Editor

While the lack of snow in most of Canada means that it doesn’t really look like it, we’re only a couple of days away from Christmas, and all of the celebrations that go along with it.

CBN will be taking a break for a few days so that our “staff” (i.e. me) can eat, drink and be merry, and maybe catch up on some movies I’ve been meaning to see all year but never got around to.

In the meantime, wherever you are and whatever you’re celebrating, I’d like to offer my best wishes. Enjoy the season!

cheers,
Greg Clow

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you and yours from Canadian Beer News. Thanks to all for your support in 2010, and I look forward to supplying all of your beer and brewing news needs in 2011 and beyond!

cheers,
Greg Clow

The Twitter feed features a tweet with a link for every CBN article, automatically posted at the same time they’re published here, as well as other occasional tweets and retweets of info of interest to Canadian beer drinkers.

The Facebook page features wall posts linking back to CBN articles via the NetworkedBlogs app, with more to come.

So if you’re so inclined, please follow and/or like CBN, and help spread the word about the site to your friends and followers.

Canadian Beer News is one of many sources that are currently feeding posts to the site, and we’re looking for more blogs to join the fray.

If you’re based in Canada and have a blog that covers any aspect of food and/or drink, please consider submitting it to the pool. Beer & Butter Tarts only publishes excerpts from posts that are fed to it, with a link back to the original, so the end result will be more traffic to your blog.

While all requests to canadianbeernews.wordpress.com will redirect to the applicable page at www.canadianbeernews.com, this may not be the case indefinitely, so please update your bookmarks to point to the new location.

Also, please excuse any glitches as we finish work on the new site.

As you can see, the ‘stache does a good job catching beer foam. For that and many other reasons, I’m going to be glad to shave it off in just a couple of days.

In the meantime, it’s not to late to show your support for me and my Movember team in our efforts to raise awareness and money for the battle against prostate cancer. If you’re able to give anything, even just a few bucks, please click here and pitch in whatever you can. Thanks!

Since Canadian Beer News is intended to be a news blog first and foremost, I generally take a fairly impersonal approach to the posts here, and save my personal opinions and thoughts for my other blog, Beer Beats & Bites. In this case, however, I think the importance of the topic justifies getting rid of my editorial anonymity for just a moment to make a personal plea.

This month, I’m participating in Movember, a campaign to raise money and awareness for prostate cancer, a disease that affects millions of men worldwide. Along with my many “Mo Bros”, I’m growing a moustache on my usually clean-shaven face, and trying to drum up donations for the cause.

This issue is especially important to me as my full-time job is in the data warehouse department at a cancer agency, where I deal with a frightening volume of cancer data and statistics on a daily basis. It’s estimated that 1 in 6 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime, and while a straight-up cure may not be within reach yet, there’s a lot we can do to help us get there, and to assist those men who are diagnosed in the meantime.

Wanna help? Click here to donate. At the very least, you’ll make me feel a little better about this ridiculous thing I have growing on my face.

The RSS feed of CBN posts was previously being fed to my other account, @beerbeatsbites, but they’ll now be going to @cdnbeernews exclusively.

• Taste T.O. is a website that my wife, Sheryl Kirby, and I have been running since early 2007. Its fairly self-explanatory tagline is “Food & Drink in Toronto”, and it features restaurant reviews, local food news, shop profiles and lots more. Along with various event and news round-up posts that I compile for the site, I also have a regular Tuesday slot that focuses on beer, alternating between beer reviews and pub profiles, with an occasional event recap as well.
• Beer & Butter Tarts is a new site launched by Sheryl and I just this past week, where we’ll be expanding beyond Toronto to look at food and drink all across Canada. I’ll be posting beer reviews there on a semi-regular basis under the column title “Stubbies & Longnecks”, as well as weekly headline round-ups of the posts here on CBN.
• Beer Beats & Bites is my personal blog that I don’t post to as often as I’d like. But when I do, it mainly features stuff about beer (reviews, etc.), and occasionally bits about other drinks, food and (very rarely) music.