A New Look and New Features

Saturday, July 1, 2006 1:05 am Daniel J. Summers

Those of you who visit regularly may notice something different about this site. The last time I did a major upgrade, I upgraded to use something that I had written. There were still a lot of features that I wanted, but didn't have time to write. Finally, a few weeks ago, I was looking around at some of the packages offered by my hosting company, and it hit me - why waste time writing something when packages exist that will do what I want?

So, this is what I've got for now. I'm using an open-source blog generating tool to run the site, and it has all the features I was going to build - the ability to leave comments, a way to search all the posts, and a way to arrange the posts into categories. As far as the look, I was going to try to make it look the same, and just use this tool to manage it. I may still do that, but designing a theme for this package is more than I have time to tackle at the moment. Besides, I'd rather put my time into the content of the site. (This is my first post since mid-March…)

Another feature that this has is RSS feeds. These let you “subscribe” or make an “active bookmark”, then you're notified whenever there's a new post. There are feeds built in for the main blog itself, the comments, and each of the main and subcategories. I hope that this will allow me to write a bit more frequently, and this will keep you from having to check back if you're curious as to what I've said recently.

The old site still exists. (Edit: It's gone.) I will be importing the older posts as I have a chance - I've brought over a few, but they don't look quite the way I want them to, so it looks like I'll have some cleaning up to do.