Effective immediately, there’s a new look for my site. I’ve been looking for an easier way to do news, and it finally occurred to me. “Blogify it!” :) I’ve been running a personal blog for some time now, but until recently, it never occurred to me to update my various sites with blog software for news. So here I am. It took me a few days to get this all down, setting up the css and the templates so it mostly looked like the old site was hard, and then I had a display problem with Internet explorer. I finally got that fixed, so here it is! It was designed to work best with your screen resolution to be 1024×768 or higher. It mostly works with 800×600, but there’s a small display issue with some browsers there. And 640×480? Uh, get a video card, please. But if you’re 1024×768 or higher, you should not see any problems.
This new news system will allow people to search the news that I post, which wasn’t a real option before. However, it’s only going forward. I went backwards with my old news only till the end of this past season. I didn’t see the point in entering all my old news into the system (I first started this site in December of 1998), especially since I’d have to do it by hand (if I can get old news imported automatically, I might revisit this decision).
Additionally, this new system will allow you to comment on my news stories and whatnot without having to visit my forums (which are still very much open and alive). This is just another way of communicating. Plus, being blog software I get to be connected to other blogs of relevant content, when it’s appropriate.
But the bottom line is that it will make things easier for me, and I’m also trying to insert a little more of “myself” into things. In the past, I’ve made comments here and there, but on the whole, I haven’t said much about individual news stories. I hope to change that. I don’t think I’ll ever be anywhere NEAR as verbose as Jamey Newberg is, but I hope I can say something once in awhile that people might like.
Finally, I’ve removed a few options from the menu on the left. One is “News”. Given that the news page on the site comes up when you first hit the site, I’ve removed that option. If you want to get “Home” on here, click the baseball in the upper left hand corner. I’ve also removed the “From Joe’s Mind” option. Mostly because I’ve incorporated all the old entries from that location into this news system. I have categories here (if you look to the options to your right), so you can see all those that way if you want to. I’ll just be putting all the Joe’s Mind comments (which weren’t many anyway) into this new news layout, since it will also have commentary from me.
Let me know what you think of the new system by leaving a comment – you can do that right below this text by clicking on the Comments link – it’s between the time and the word “Trackback” (trackback is something used to connect blog entries to another blog’s entries).