I redesigned. It may seem sudden to you but, as my husband can attest to, it took ages for it to actually come about. Part of the problem is that I just enjoy fiddling with my website; Movable Type is so much fun to play with, and there's so much to learn.

Here's what I changed and why:

First of all, I narrowed the layout, but left it somewhat flexible. It should be friendlier to people with their monitors set to 800 x 600 resolution, or with bookmarks in the sidebar; it should also look okay on large monitors set at 1024 x 768 or larger.

The next most important change was to put comments (on the home page) into a popup window. This allows me (technically) to display multiple posts on the home page, which in turn allows me (psychologically) to write a shorter post if I want to. If I allow myself to write shorter posts, I'll write more often, and one thing I really want to do is write more often.

That long blank page in the previous design (which only showed one post on the home page) intimidated me and made me feel like I had to post something that was 500+ words and ready for publication. The whole point of this site is that it's not ready for publication; it's just for fun.

I'm finally making use of the categories in Movable Type. I've always been assigning them to entries, but never had the time and patience to figure out how to present articles by category. Now that I've done it, I see it's not really that hard.

I've also simplified the archives somewhat, grouping the posts by month. It's still a loooooong list though.

Filenames for individual archives (what you see when you click on the title of a post) are no longer just numbers. They are now a combination of number and name, which allows the files to be sorted chronologically, yet gives some inkling of the post's content in the filename.

I no longer have a links page; instead I use Blogrolling to maintain a list of links, and display them on the homepage sidebar.

For a long time, I've wanted to add some other little tidbits to the home page (the most recent book I've read, a list of things that are on my mind but don't warrant a full entry). Finally did that.

I think that's all. I promise to write soon.