You may have noticed some changes I've made to the site recently. I nearly decided to redo it entirely with WordPress, but in the end I realized that I'm just too much of a control freak with my code. Plus, converting my blog entries to the WordPress format would be a royal pain. Eventually, I'll redesign this entire site from scratch, but I don't have the time right now.
The first thing I did was teach myself a bit about mod_rewrite, which let me use nicer URLs without going through a major rewrite to make this blog work like WebFu does. So you'll notice that this entry is at greghowley.com/172 rather than greghowley.com/index.php?page=blog&id=172. Much nicer, and it makes the search engines happier too. If you notice any bugs or dead links as a result of this, please let me know so I can fix them.
You may notice that I took out the links to the other page layouts - the WATER and STORMY WEATHER layouts. I like this one just fine, and I wasn't liking the fact that they were actually different templates rather than just separate stylesheets like I did with WebFu.
I also quickly wrote a wrapper for the main index of the photo gallery so it looks more like the rest of the site. It doesn't match exactly, but that's because I'm feeling lazy. It's better than it was.
Lastly, I rewrote the entire 'blog' file, which doesn't include the archives or the admin functions I use, but it means that the markup behind the site has changed. I tried very hard to make sure that it looks the same. The only visible difference should be when you leave comments. Again, if you find any bugs, please let me know.
My next goals are to add in a random entry from the archives in the sidebar, and a new-and-improved book module which will show not which book I'm currently reading, but which book I've most recently completed reading. That way, the linked book will have a review instead of saying "I'm currently reading this book". I think the music module, random link module, and vocab module I used to have up are gone for good. This site is in a constant state of change, I guess.
Also, I've added a weighted random link sidebar. :)