The new design is up! And I’ve customized the design of this blog, the forums and the
FAQ to match (well, OK, the blog only sort of matches, but I like this theme a lot and it looks good with my title graphic, so what the hell…).

The web reviews are being really ornery — the script I’m using there works with something called “smarty templates” (I think they’re also used in Xoops), which choke and die if you attempt to embed any PHP in them. And yes, contrary to appearances — I know the pages all still say .html at the end outside of the areas like this one that use third-party scripts — the new design is heavily PHP based. I used an htaccess file to allow HTML files to interpret PHP so I wouldn’t have to break every incoming link into my site by changing the ending of the files to .php. So that part still looks really blah.

This blog will probably be news to most of you, though I actually installed it nearly a year ago. I had in mind to launch it with the redesign, and thought at the time that I’d get the new design up sooner than I did, but I’ve been really busy. So there are a few entries from earlier in the year, but tonight is the first time it’s been publicly linked from the rest of the site.

The blog replaces the action alerts sections, and the what’s new sections. I think I can set it up so that other people can post, but I haven’t quite sorted that out yet, so in the meantime, if there’s an action alert or news item you’d like to see posted here, you can e-mail it to me. I’ve created categories for each of the site areas, so people who are only interested in one area can easily read just the postings that are relevant to it.

It can also generate an RSS feed, so you can add it to your LiveJournal friends page or any other RSS reader you may use.

Lastly, I know there are still a lot of glitches on the redesigned site, and areas that need major updating. I’ll be working on that in the near future — I have a mile-long things-to-do list for this site. So if you spot anything that looks wrong, chances are I already know about it, but feel free to e-mail me about it anyway. If nothing else, it will be a nice sign that people are actually looking at this site and didn’t forget about it during the rather long period in which I wasn’t really updating it.