In addition to a new look, the underlying code has changed. I used to blog on a home-brewed VBScript based system. This incarnation of the blog, however, is built on WordPress. It’s also built using HTML5 and makes use of some CSS3 selectors for presentation. The idea was to simplify the publishing process to encourage more writing, and as part of that, I also wanted to simplify the look a little bit. Using HTML5 and CSS3 just give me an excuse to play around with those technologies a bit.

Finally, with a new design, comes slightly different content. Historically, I’ve always treated the site as a place for web development related articles exclusively. The problem with this is that A) it’s not particularly personal and B) my interests have expanded greatly. So, going forward the site will no longer be limited to just web development – though there will still be plenty of that. Let’s just say if I find it interesting, and feel inclined to write about it, it’ll make it’s way onto the site. As a result, the blog will also reflect a slightly more personal tone than it historically has.

There’s still a few rough spots to iron out with the new look – so if you stumble upon anything missing or that obviously looks out of place, feel free to shoot me a line about it if you feel so inclined.

I do have what I feel are a few fairly good excuses for being quiet lately. I just recently purchased my first home, which my wife and I are quite excited by. It has kept us both busy moving and making some quick touch-ups and improvements. Even more exciting, we found out that my wife is pregnant with what will be our first child. Again…extremely excited, but I am finding that I am spending a fair amount of time ensuring that things are in place for when the little one arrives.

Finally…I started a new job in June. It’s much more development heavy than my prior position and I’m enjoying it greatly. That being said, there was some time spent ensuring that I get up to speed with the company’s existing projects and work styles. Nothing irritates me more than knowing that I could do something much quicker if I had a better handle on things. I don’t like that “introductory period” where I have to turn to ask questions about simple little procedures simply because I don’t know the company’s tendencies, so I like to get familiarized as quickly as possible.

So between those three things, all exciting as they are, I have had very little time for updating the site. Which is unfortunate…I’ve been working on getting the site switched over to PHP and have some cool and important improvements that will come with this (one of which is an improved comment spam filter….those spammers are amazingly persistent).

There are also numerous posts I have written up that I just need to take the time to add to the site. So the content is there…or, I guess, will be there. The resolution for August is to get back to a regular schedule for updating the site…so stay tuned.

First off, I’ve increased the focus on past posts. I decided to add a listing of the latest posts to each page, as well as a listing of the most popular posts on the site in terms of views. The idea here is to hopefully make it easier for you to find earlier posts that you may have missed that may still be worth a look.

I also decided to add full RSS feeds. I have heard a lot about the debate between partial and full feeds and wasn’t sure at first how to proceed with them. Up to now, I had just been offering partial feeds. I am still keeping those, for any of you who do prefer them but I am also offering an RSS feed with the full posts in them now for those of you who prefer to have the entire article in front of you.

One new area in the footer is a listing of the galleries that were gracious enough to link to my site. I was overwhelmed by the positive response to the design of the site, and those galleries are how quite a few of you first came across the site. I thought I would finally get around to returning the favor by supplying some links back to them.

Finally, I decided to embed by Twitter status into the site. I fought the Twitter urge until March, but once I finally gave in, I’ve become fairly addicted. It’s a makes it easy to keep connected with people who you may not converse with a whole heck of a lot otherwise, and if you are following the right people, it can be quite the news informant…lots of tech news seems to hit Twitter before anywhere else. To sum it up, you could do a lot worse for a networking tool.

Now, with all the new additions, something had to go to clear up some room. So, I decided to pull the “Things I Learned Online” section. Actually, I’ve wanted to do something different with that anyway, and this made for a good excuse. By only showing a couple links at a time in the side, I felt that some of the articles and tools I come across probably weren’t getting the attention they deserve given their quality. I wanted a way to highlight a few more at a time, and to do it in a way that brings a bit more attention to them.

So after much hemming and hawing I decided to occasionally post a small group of links to resources, articles and tools that I have found that I think may interest you. Don’t worry…I’m not going to turn into a site that posts nothing but lists of other sites, nor am I going to start doing a whole bunch of Digg-made top 10 posts. The bulk of the posts here are still going to be the same kind of content you’ve been seeing with focuses on technical, design, and theoretical articles…I’ll just occasionally throw some focus out to other articles that I think are worth a read.

Having said all that (that was a bit more long-winded than intended), I’m always interested in improving the quality of what my site has to offer. So, if anyone has any strong opinions about any new changes (good or bad), or has some other ideas they’d like to see implemented (content or just enhancements), let me know.

What can you expect…well, there will be many conversations about what I have learned or come across in the world of web development. In particular, you should eventually see information on things like CSS, XHTML, Javascript, and so on.

There will be some personal updates mixed in I am sure, but I think it is fair to say that the vast majority of posts will be informative and educational in nature.

This is a custom built blog system, so if anything is quirky, or some feature that you feel is seriously important is not here (other than pretty permalinks, they’ll be coming soon), please feel free to let me know.

So stay tuned and hopefully I will have something a little more interesting to read for you soon.