redesign time.
Alright, new look. I spent a stupid amount of time thinking about a site redesign and even more time implementing it. BORING POST TIME.
Karen makes the should-be-obvious point that "the thing people are there to see should be right up front". The journal is the only thing of recurring interest on this site, so it's on the front page now. The nav that the old splash screen (ugh, I know) provided was "important", but the nav is still with us and it's actually useful now.
Anyone who's ever tried to keep a blog by hand knows it's a terrible idea. You gotta make posting easy and consistent or you'll never keep up with it. For the past 3 years, my solution was a homebrew system written in Emacs. It worked great but wasn't very template-y, and it wasn't web-based so I had to write at home. So I just migrated to movable type. I'm impressed. It's thoughtfully designed, consistent, and flexible. Template-izing everything to meet my site's exacting UI guidelines was time-consuming, but it was also kinda fun. MT also gives me an RSS feed for free, which is nice in the exciting Age Of Blogging. I hope to write much more often, specifically about Wordclock goings-on, so maybe the RSS feed will get used. (Unfortunately I'm still trapped by my desire to post a photo with every entry... that's a problem since I barely shoot these days.)
Most blogs have (many) (posts) (on) (their) main page. That's how I started the redesign, but it bothered me. Because EVERYTHING I WRITE IS SO IMPORTANT. I like having one post visible at a time. I've never given it much thought but when forced to, I realized that I try to write little missives that stand on their own, and I don't really want you the reader skimming through them in a hurry. So, one post is all you get.
While I was at it ... inspired and assisted by the wife, I went completely XHTML and CSS -- there's no tables here. That was entertaining and educational, and the resulting code is readable and flexible. (thanks for the design help, Bradee.)
Oh, and I finally tried some PHP. I have MT spitting out PHP so that I can make consistent, dynamic menus everywhere. This is a thing of beauty except I haven't figured out how to get MT's CGI output to push through the PHP engine yet, so comment pages (cgi-based) use a different menu template. Anyway, watch me convert all my sites to PHP shortly.
The biggest pain was probably importing all of my old stuff. Even though my emacs system required a "source" file that it read before generating HTML... I never kept those source files around. I just kept the generated HTML. Never throw out your source files. I know that ordinarily. But because in this case I was an idiot, I had to write scripts to extract date/subject/image/caption/entrytext from the generated HTML files, which had changed formatting about 6 times over the years.
THAT WAS ALL REALLY EXCITING! NEVER WRITE ABOUT THIS SHIT AGAIN PLEASE THANKS. There's nothing worse than blogs about blogging, but if I inflicted all that pain on myself, the least I can do is inflict it on both of my loyal fans.
In other news, my registration for gregfuckedacamel.com just expired, so all you domain squatters can start fighting it out.