A Thousand Points of Distraction

Due to various obligations, client-sites to be worked on, etc. the site has been rather static for awhile. The good news is that I am back and have been actively working on the site (behind the scenes) in the past few days.

One of the biggest changes was the virtualization of this site and many others that I run. As some of you may or may not know, I run between 12-15 sites at any given time (in addition to a full-time job, freelance projects and trying to find quality time to spend with my beautiful wife and daughter!) This has gotten very unwieldy not only in terms of updating the various sites regularly, but also in simply managing the Content Management software that I run on them. What I have finally done is to setup my CMS software in a multi-site configuration (a fairly technical procedure not for the faint of heart!). This migration is complete and I am now running nine sites off of a single codebase! I am sure that is just nerdy tech-babble to many of you, but the end result is that I now have significantly more time to actually create content, which is the point after all.

In a nutshell, here are some of the new site features:

• My Art Galleries are now dynamically-generated Flash galleries! So all I need to do is upload an image to have it automatically display in a given gallery. You can still access the plain-style galleries by clicking on the various gallery tags above each post. I am still debating if I should make those link to the Flash galleries as well. For now it seems nice to give users a way to still access the content if for some reason they do not or cannot run Flash in their browser.
• The Weblinks database has been cleaned up of some errors, missing file references and tag categories removed etc. Finally the directory view of the Weblinks has been updated as well, which was long, long overdue and desperately needed!
• Various subtle and not-so subtle bells and whistles have been implemented (collapsing blocks and navigation areas, redeployed the lightbox feature for images which had been broken for some time, etc.)
• Fairly extensive testing of features was done and (nearly) all bugs in my arch-nemesis browser (Internet Exploder) have been fixed. Incidentally, if you haven't already - get Firefox (or at least Opera or Safari)! But I won't get started on that topic, it is one of those which I like to rant about for hours at any opportunity (a natural by-product of a decade in Web Development).

I hope everyone enjoys the new site features and looks forward to new artwork being posted soon!