New job, new house in a new state, new car, new EVERYTHING.  Life’s been a little crazy lately, but also a lot of fun.  I’m really enjoying the new job so far, and with the learning potential and challenges ahead it only stands to get better.  I continue to be very pleasantly surprised by how passionate everyone there is about making truly usable, beautiful, accessible, and standardized websites and apps.  That attitude goes a long way toward getting me excited about the future there.  The work they’ve done recently is really genuinely good stuff, equal to just about anything else out there, and superior to a lot of it!  They have some very talented designers and developers, and are bringing more on board all the time.

Virginia is pretty great too, it’s beautiful out here.  Mountains west and north of us, and hundreds of square miles of beautiful greenery in between.

The site re-design has sort of been victimized by the whole moving process,  but every now and then i’ve had a chance to go in and make a little change, most of which have little to no visual impact , but are important nonetheless.  IE6  rendering isn’t as bad as I expected, but there’s still a little housecleaning there to be done.  That’s about as low as i’m going to go on trying to give a browser the full experience, anything older will have to suffer through a little ugliness.  With IE7 out now, 99% of the population really has no excuse to not be using a halfway decent browser, and I don’t feel any responsibility to enable them by making things pretty at the cost of awkward hacks and invalid code.  That’s the real joy of having a personal site, not having to cater to everyone!

There’s still a lot of little WP template issues i’m sure.  Forms on obscure pages I haven’t even looked at yet, etc, so I apologize to anyone happening across any ugliness on here.  I’m working on it!

Well, we’re almost there.  WordPress is up and running (well).  The re-design has been mostly fleshed out and seems functional.  There’s still a lot of tweaking to do for aesthetic purposes, and the sidebar is largely untouched by CSS, so that will change too.  IE7 needs some hand-holding, and I haven’t even looked at IE6 yet.  I’m sure it’s a real mess.  Safari looked decent (on Windows… thanks to the new beta!), and I haven’t checked Opera.

I’m pretty happy with the color scheme and the few graphics.  I like the nice open, airy layout.  Much less “confining” than my previous MovableType templates.  WordPress is a DREAM to code for in comparison.  Getting the site to validate as XHTML Strict on MT would have taken an act of God.  WordPress offered me no resistance at all.  Hopefully in the next few days I’ll have her all polished and pretty.  Comments are welcome, as always.

I have a complete migration to Word Press and re-design from scratch in progress. Please excuse any non-working content or crazy layout issues while this is going on.

A couple of posts back, I talked about upgrading to Movable Type 3.2. I semi-promised to update when I had a better idea of how the new spam gizmos worked.

I now have this better idea. For a week now, since the upgrade, I’ve thought that Murphy’s Law was taking hold of the site and sending spammers elsewhere to prevent me from properly testing the new installation. Turns out I was wrong! While tooling around on the Comment screen of my MT control panel just now, I noticed a new tab that said “Junk Comments”. I clicked it, and lo and behold, HUNDREDS of spam comments that Movable Type 3.2 just quietly disposed of, never wasting my time alerting me of their presence. Needless to say, I’m thrilled. Now, not only is my site effectively battling evil spam, but it’s doing it 100% without any input or interaction with me at all. Not so much as an email! This is wonderful. It took me months to get MT Blacklist’s exception list full enough to have that effect, and now MT 3.2 has done it right out of the box. What a fantastic improvement to what was already really great software. Thanks Six Apart!

While adding a few new entries to my spam blacklist yesterday, I noticed that a new version of Movable Type had been released. 3.2, to be specific. I had been running 3.11 without issue for almost a year, so I didn’t really see any reason to go through the hassle of upgrading until I came across the new features list. 3.2 has some pretty hefty built-in spam fighting measures, so I couldn’t resist.

Even though MT-Blacklist has served me beautifully, and I have waxed amorously about its effectiveness more than once on here, I love messing with new gizmos. 3.2 has new spam gizmos, so I installed it. In keeping with Murphy’s Law, my site is experiencing a respite from spam since the new software was installed, so unfortunately I can’t yet know how good these new gizmos are. I will update as warranted, or far less than warranted, as usual.

P.S. - a few entries back, I mentioned that I had switched from Firefox to Maxthon, and pledged to explain why at a later date. I was reminded yesterday that I failed to do that, so here is the latest on my browsing equipment: I switched back to Firefox again. Originally, I quit using Firefox because of a memory leak in 0.6 or whatever version was current back then, which caused it to eventually eat my entire gig of ram. Maxthon served me well during that period, and I still use it today when I need IE6 for something. However, Firefox had its memory leak fixed, so I switched back. I also quit using the Moog builds, finding that I preferred to be bleeding-edge than a hair quicker. Currently, I’m using the Firefox 1.5 beta 2 build, and I like it quite a bit. Maybe soon I’ll do a post about my extremely tailored configuration, but that time is not now.