It’s been a month since my last post. And the previous post was another month before that. But I figure, if that’s how often I’m going to update, why not embrace it?

Welcome to the… 14th?… incarnation of my blog. The biggest change you’ll notice, aside from the new design, is that I’m going to try to focus on longer-format blogging — which should work nicely with the once-a-month update schedule I’ve been keeping lately.

There are still some glaring errors with the new design — nothing’s been spaced properly, the search function isn’t working yet, cross-browser support is lacking — but I felt it was more important to get things up and running than to have everything pixel-perfect at launch. There are a couple more features I want to plug in, such as a better archive browser that caters to long-format (and multi-part) entries. There’s at least one feature I have planned that will result in a huge departure from the way I normally blog. But those will come later. It was time to pull the trigger, so until things are squeaky-clean and hyper-efficient, I hope you’ll find the problems with the site… quaint.

I should probably note that as part of the new site design, all the URLs for the old site have been broken, so any links to old entries will no longer work. Sadly, this was a necessity of moving from Expression Engine to Textpattern, which was no easy feat. That also makes this the fourth time this blog has completely changed content managers, from ashBlog to Textpattern to Expression Engine back to Textpattern. Because of my awesome SQL and PHP skills, I was able to move over every morsel of content from Expression Engine — I’ll talk about how I did that later. Or rather, I’ll rant about it on the Textpattern forum and link that rant here.

Let me know if there’s anything you love/hate about the new site. Opaque-on-hover sidebar getting you down? Angry that the comments are smaller than the article text? The beautiful beige, blue and green enabling you to have a better quality of life? Let me know.

Also, I should note that I’ve been blogging for over eight years, now. This factoid blows my mind. Also: “factoid” is an awesome word. Why say “fact” when you can say “factoid”?

And I should really dig through the archives to see how many times I’ve redesigned this silly thing. The last couple times I’ve redesigned, I’ve just made up a number.

Aaron