First things first – yesterday I walked around our front yard and picked up some trash that people had apparently thrown from their cars. It was only two things. One was an empty cigarette box. The other was an empty bra box, size 40D! Goodness. I can’t seem to figure it out, though. Was the person in such a hurry that she had to rip open the box in the car and get that bra on immediately? I guess if you’re going commando with 40D’s, maybe you do need it on right away.

So……this is the new site. A few notes:

• This isn’t just a normal redesign like I’ve done in the past. I basically took ALL of the content from the previous five years and moved it to another blog provider’s site. A big job! There were a few nervous moments, like the time just after the transfer when I first typed the blog URL into the browser…..and saw nothing. I recovered it though.

• Previously, when I redesigned, I’d do the redesign on the home page, then I would have to go and manually change/code all of the other pages by hand to match the homepage. Time-consuming and laborious. I’m sure there’s a way to do that in blogger, but I don’t know enough code or CSS to do it. WordPress does it for me. Now, everything is totally uniform. If I make a change to the structure of home page, it mirrors throughout the site and every other page. No more will you see differently designed pages when you click off onto something else. If you want to see old designs, that’s what the awesome Internet Archive is for.

• There’s a new categorization system there on the right. As you can tell by the amount of uncategorized posts, I’m still in the process of assigning categories to each post. This will take some time, but when it’s finished, it’ll be way easier for you to navigate the site. Example – I don’t need to create a page anymore for things like Item Five. You can just click on the Item Five categorization link and see all the interviews I’ve done.

• Each post now has it’s own web page, too. Just click on the title of this post to see what I mean. Previously you’d have to search the site and when you looked for a post, you’d have to scroll through the entire month of posts to try and find the specific thing you were looking for. No more. There’s too many posts here now so I needed a better system of finding stuff – this and categorization provide a huge improvement.

• Archives are updated with a new calendar-style implementation in the sidebar on every page. Much easier to navigate the old stuff.

• There is a new About page, slightly updated from the old.

• Comments are just as easy and do not require login, passwords or any crap like that. Just click on the comments line at the bottom of any post (it’ll say “no comments” if there are no comments yet).

There will be additional changes coming – this is step 1. A note to the RSS people – I’m not entirely sure my Feedburner feed is working correctly. I am working on this. There is an RSS feed of this page, but it’s WordPress’s feed and not Feedburner. I’d prefer if you hold off on re-subscribing until I figure out the Feedburner thing, but do what you need to do. The feed should be here if you need it.

All told, this change benefits me more on the backend than it probably does for you. To you, it probably looks like just another re-design with some slight changes. But it was a huge undertaking and I think it’ll be a vast improvement. Rock on.