How Now?

Fri 12 Mar 2004 22:29:24

If you are reading this, then the transplant was a success.

I apologize for my long internet absence. It was not my intention to leave you comfortless for such an extended interval, but I was loath to release an incomplete site, and could not bear to emerge from the dust of rebuilding until everything was... just... so.

Major changes follow.

• The "hownow" subdomain, in addition to reinforcing the "brownpau" brand, is also part of an effort to organize and modularize hosted projects and site content, with the "hownow" section devoted to personal text, pictures, and weblog material. More projects are in the pipeline, struggling amongst themselves to rush out of a narrow time-and-focus bottleneck.
• Weblog archives now publish as single entries. The decision to switch to individual posts was a long and conflicted one. My preference for monthly archives was rooted in the desire to show posts within a temporal, narrative context; but a monthly listing is long, slow, tedious, and bandwidth-intensive, and anchored permalinks -- textual or numeric -- proved unreliable and confusing. Additionally, trackback pings sent out for date-based archives carried nonstandard numeric anchors, a default which could not be changed to the dirified title anchors that I preferred. Individual entry links fix this problem, giving each entry its own easily identifiable page, with comments and trackbacks all integrated. Monthly archives remain, but only as entry excerpts linking to full entries. With enough coding, you too can have future-proof and cruft-free MT archive URLs.
• New CSS on inside pages. Initial inspiration for the design came from the introductory header box at the top of Andy Budd's blog. A fixed-width layout was settled on, for simplicity's sake, and the header-nested vertical nav menu came soon after.
• I was startled to realize that one can easily link to PHP scripts as CSS files with dynamically generated content, using header to declare a crafty "Content-Type: text/css." This bodes well for the return of randomizing blog layouts.
• As has been stated elsewhere: Georgia. It's the new Verdana.
• More coming soon. It's been a busy interval.