This is fourhman.com version 7.0. And that's an honest tracking number too, not some made-up bullshit. I consider each full graphic redesign to be a new number, so that's seven complete renovations since 1995. I get bored easily.
Lately I'd been wanting something more "webloggy" for fourhman.com, since the weblog has become the driving force behind this site. (Compared to 1997, when it was all about Duke Nukem maps and Magic decks.) This is actually my second attempt at a more modern look; the first try died unwanted in Photoshop sometime last spring.
This is my opportunity to jettison some of the lesser-travelled sections (good bye, dedicated card games page!) and scuttle all of the little widgety things that I have grown weary of updating. Like the "recently played songs" and the list of games I want to buy.
Also disappearing is the Quick Reviews portion of the video game section. It's a good idea in theory - succinct takes on new games - but it always felt like I was forcing myself to write them. Not fun, so sayonara. Astute DredPage fans will note that this is the second time I've started and stopped posting Quick Reviews.
There's still some work to be done... the video games section is MIA, the revamped Clark section is only sparsely populated with pics, and I want to shake out a bunch more "weblog features" to make some of the neater, older weblog entries a little more prominent. So don't mind the odd missing image or broken link for a week or two. I am happy that v7.0 is much less graphics-heavy.
I also scrambled deep under the FTP hood and cleaned out three years worth of old graphics that I'm no longer using and therefore ought to be no longer storing. That was fun. There's still some old Movable Type-generated templates and archive pages that I'd like to trash, but skittering amongst MT files always makes me nervous. Jenga, jenga, jenga.
Then there's the always grating issue of browser capatibility. I checked the following browsers: Mac Firefox, Mac IE, Safari, Win98 IE, WinXP Firefox, WinXP Netscape and WinXP IE, and I was reasonably happy with all of them. It's always some stupid spacing or sizing issue. I'll do some additional investigating, because I know what sorts of browsers you folks are using and I want things to look as nice as possible.
Added a live comment shoutbox to the main page. I'm sure that might be entertaining every now and again. Ever since the site was getting comment-bombed my robot spammers and I stripped comments from almost everywhere, I've missed that slight bit of interactivity (the only remaining areas with Movable Type-based commenting are the AC and Pokemon diaries, which are easy for me to monitor). I was even getting spammed in the ping-controlled Recent Songs include, which really pissed me off and was the nail in the coffin of that mostly-uninteresting sidebar feature.
So enjoy the new look.
