The Big Blog Update

Today is the long-awaited site upgrade. It’s long-awaited in my books, anyway. I designed this new version of the site several months ago now. It has taken a long time to come to fruition, primarily because I’ve been so busy with the rest of life.

First off, if you are a RSS subscriber, you will probably not notice much of a difference except that you may find that the feed has “reset” meaning that it says there are twenty or more unread items. I do apologize for this; it should just happen this once.

As much as the site has received a visual redesign, there are even bigger changes behind the scenes. I’ve upgraded from Movable Type to Drupal [2] as the backend software. That has given me infinitely more options and abilities.

• A pretty new design.
• Improved typography.
• 10MillionWords is now integrated into the stream of content on this site. 
• A new commenting engine that includes avatars (those little pictures of the commenters).
• Improved abilities to share content via social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc).
• The ability to email an article to another person.
• Improved ability to print pages without fancy formatting.
• Better categorization of content.
• Improved search engine.

And more. But that gives you a sense of it anyway. Ultimately this site has just outgrown the ability of the old software to support it. It was high time that I made an investment in the site’s future.

Budget constraints have kept me from building out all the features I’d like to have. As I manage to find some funds, I will add new features. In the [hopefully near] future we should see:

• The ability to comment using your Facebook, Twitter or OpenID account.
• A list of related content at the bottom of each post.
• The ability for you to create an account so you can post a comment that includes links to your blog, Facebook and Twitter.
• Other useful bells, whistles and features.

I’m guessing that if you spend time on the site today, you’ll notice some inevitable little hiccups and bugs. If you notice such things, feel free to post them here so we can tidy them up.

Thanks to Travis Carden [3], programmer extraordinaire, for his diligence and near-infinite patience through this project.