If you hadn’t already noticed, I have just pushed out a new redesign for this site.
The differences are pretty substantial, too.
For one thing, I’ve finally made the leap from Movable Type to Wordpress. While Movable Type is still a perfectly good content management system in its own right, Wordpress offers a lot more flexibility for my particular needs - especially as a programmer, via its support for dynamic content generation - and seems to have greater community support these days. That definitely wasn’t the case when I switched to Movable Type from my home-grown CMS many years ago.
As part of the revamp, I’ve also begun experimenting with a few so-called “Web 2.0″ type features, particularly in the dark box shown at the top of the site’s index page. I’ve started using Twitter to post regular updates on what I’m doing, random thoughts, etc. It’s probably not something everyone will be interested in, but it doesn’t take up much room and I plan to make it so that you can close it entirely if you want.
Within the same black box section I also added areas for gaming-related content, feeds, as well as creatures I’ve been working on for Spore. A lot of this stuff is somewhat preliminary, though, and more will be added over time. It’s loaded dynamically upon viewing, so it shouldn’t slow the site down.
There’s also the new gallery, with all images now hosted on Flickr, which I will be adding to shortly.
Anyhow, that’s just a basic overview. There are a number of additions/changes that I plan on making shortly - and, no doubt, more than a few bug fixes. While I liked the old site, in some senses it was held together with the virtual equivalent of bailing wire and duct tape - in contrast, this revamp should provide me with a lot more flexibility to add new features in the future.
Update:
A couple of notes on compatibility.
First, with this revision, I’m more or less giving IE6 a well-deserved boot to the ass. While IE7 is hardly perfect, it is head-and-shoulders above its predecessor (it is, after all, a “post-Firefox” browser, whereas with IE6 Microsoft had no competition at all to speak of).
As far as I know the only major issue should be the extensive use of PNG alpha transparency (that standard came out in 1996, so you can hardly blame Microsoft for taking 10 years to finally get it right). I might take a look into getting that to work a little better, but - with IE6’s share of the market dropping precipitously and the major improvements in IE7 - it’s hard to muster up any motivation to do.
Anyhow, if you’ve not upgraded yet - ideally to Firefox - I highly encourage it.
In a more positive note, there is also now an iPhone-specific user interface for the site. It works really, really well. While I’m more inclined to read RSS/Atom feeds on an iPhone when given a chance (and I have those too), it’s nice having an especially quick-loading version available.
