Like everybody else that I know, I put up a new website today. (Well, John didn’t, but I’m sure he’s got a good excuse.) The May 1st Reboot seemed like good incentive to redesign, though I must say that I think that their shut-down-your-site-for-a-week thing is stupid, and I had no part in it. I also think that the fact that the event was sponsored, as Chad pointed out, is pretty weak.
Anyhow, this is the new design. For now, I have a photo of myself on the front page that I totally hate. I think that this is good — I like that the world is seeing a photo of me that I think shows me at my very worst: unshaven, tired, lop-headed. That picture, by the way, was taken at the Charlottesville-Albemarle Airport on November 30th, while I was waiting for my plane out to L.A. for the VH1 Music Awards. The previous site had a blurry colorized picture of me, which was a way of denying that it was a personal site. But, hell, Waldo.Net has been a personal site for years, so why hide it? So I’ve put that nasty photo on the front for the whole world to see.
The whole site runs on a templating system now, which will make update way simpler. It also means that I can do things like easily add news headlines to some of my oddball entry pages to suck people in. Also, this design uses the full browser width, which is a big help, has links that are blue and underlined (love the standards!), and is generally simpler.
I’ve got some tweaks to do (adding images to subpage templates, making text more legible, restoring subpage meta tags to their former glory, etc.), but this is pretty much what things will look like for a bit.
Sidenote: I’m writing a threaded, non-user-account based discussion system, sort of a Slashdot-meets-BlogVoices. I may eventually add it to this very news system, though I’m not convinced that there’s any merit to having people comment on these foolish little notes that I put up here. It’s written in PHP, of course. I’ll release it under the GPL, and intend to have seven revisions until I release 1.0. I’ve been writing this code for a while for my own sites, but I figure that I’ll make it available to the public, since so many folks have expressed interest.