I am working on a redesign of the site's layout and navigation, a preview of which can be found here. That page also automatically updates, just as the main page does, so if you already prefer the new look, you can temporarily bookmark the new-look page. Comments and criticisms are welcome, especially from those of you whom I did not previously email on the subject.

So I had put off two minor projects for the site for a while: a colophon, and moving all my photos from my .Mac account over to this domain. As of now, those two projects have been finished. More photos will be forthcoming, as I will likely move the photo albums from my old domain over to this one, so that everything is in one place. Permanent links to both are in the new Navigate tabbed menu at the top sub-menu to the right. Enjoy!

At the same time I decided to upgrade my MovableType engine to 2.63, I donated some funds to Ben and Mena. By doing so, I received a couple of keys to plug in, so when I post something new, the site would show up in the MovableType site's "Recently Updated" section. I began receiving an odd error message when saving posts, after I had done all of this. I reinstalled the upgrade package. Then I removed the recent-update key; problem solved. I tried the 2d recent-update key; problem returns. I take out the 2d key; problem solved. So now I know, and I've let the Trotts know, so we'll see what happens. UPDATE, 5/19: Turns our your doofus host doesn't have a certain Perl module installed. Obviously, I thought some time back, why would I ever use that? Thanks, Ben!

I don't know what it is, but sometimes I get this minimalist bug. So yesterday I decided to kill the parchment background (thanks again, Lee!) and just go with white. Helps save on the bandwidth for dial-up users as well. Also, I added in a dotted separation line for the banner title and description at the top. I really like the way the site looks in IE 5/Mac. I just wish it looked as good in Camino and Safari. I'm soliciting feedback on this new addition, so leave a comment!

If I wasn't so happy with Movable Type, I would definitely be looking at Hiveware's Soapbox. You can learn more here.

So this morning I took care of two minor items I'd been meaning to get to. First, I used Hiveware's awesome Enkoder to encode my email address (bottom of right left-hand column on main page). Last month, I began receiving my first spam to this address, after having this site on line since October. While I will remain on some spam lists for the forseeable future, let's see the gutless scum try and spider me now! (Enkoder is also available as a standalone OS X application.) Second, I removed the Lucida Grande font from the stylesheet. Yes, it was a nod to OS X users, but Verdana is much more readable, and thus remains the primary font called.

Gibson ruminates on how everyone now can have their own mediated persona, thanks to the meme of the weblog.

Thanks to Mark Newhouse's article on Unix fonts, I was inspired to revisit the fonts called for in the site's CSS style sheet. Now, OS X users should be greeted by Lucida Grande at 11 px for for the main text font. All others will see Verdana, Geneva, Lucida, Helvetica, or Arial, in that order. Lucida is really there for any Unix readers that may happen by (say hello in the comments!). If you're a Windoze user, and all you're getting is Arial, then reinstall IE to see about getting Verdana loaded; it's a much, much, much better screen font than Arial, and I'm not just saying that because my site looks better in it. Others will as well.

Fellow ATPM staffer Eric Blair is blogging at raoli.com. The jury is still out on what "raoli" means. :)

Froogle, currently in beta, is a Google project for product price comparison.

Thanks to the nagging hints of some people, I have modified the RSS doc to show the full text of each post, rather than just a line or two. Props to Lee for the quick and easy tag fix.

Raena and I don't see eye-to-eye on a lot of stuff, but she's a fellow Mac-head and ATPM staffer, so she can't be all bad, can she? ;) Anyway, she's been blogging a while...

So I think enough changes have been made to the site within the past few weeks to warrant a full version upgrade. :) Inspired by re-reading Robin Williams' The Mac Is Not A Typewriter, I chose a monospaced typewriter font and created a new banner logo, as well as a new tagline graphic. Thanks to Michael for assistance in finding the font. The new retrophisch logo next to the name banner has been ready for a while, and my heartfelt thanks to my friend Francisco for producing what I could only envision in bad sketches. The aforementioned Macintosh book classic also inspired me to move to smart punctuation, and was reinforced by Lee's doing so on his own site. As previously mentioned, John Gruber's SmartyPants provides this. Lee created the parchment-ish background picture for me, and I am grateful. Michael and Lee both provided assistance with behind-the-scenes MT, HTML, RSS, and CSS stuff, and they have my thanks. Brian has inspired me to add a bulletin board to the site; I envision having respective private boards for my family and my fellow ATPM staffers. I hope to have those up in the very near future.

When you're a type nerd like me (never would guess that from the monospaced logo for the site, would you?), things like smart punctuation matter. Things like having curly quotes, full em dashes instead of two short dashes, and nice ellipses. You know...ellipses. So thanks to John Gruber's SmartyPants plugin for MovableType, you should now see pretty "quotes," full--I said full--em dashes, and proper ellipses... Thanks to Lee for the setup assist.