One of the goals was to keep things in the same place. So the big monthly archive list no longer jumps from the right side to the left side depending on what page you're on. The weblog feature blurb, the search box and the ad banners also (mostly) stay in the same general vicinity. The only confused soul here is the "latest entries" widget, which works fine on the main page and on the individual archive pages, but went a little nutso on the monthly archives and category archives. So you won't find it in those sections.

The basic paradigm is:

- main page: showcases latest weblog entries, links out to individual, category and monthly archive pages (among other things, which we'll get to)
- monthly archive pages: list excerpts of all the weblog entries and links to their individual pages
- indvidual archive pages: the final resting ground for all weblog entries; contains ability to leave comments (register with TypeKey!)
- category archive pages: list the entirety of all weblog entries for that category (so these pages remain GIGANTIC); contains links to the individual pages for commenting purposes; now has separate RSS feeds for each category, so people who only care about me bitching about Pokemon LeafGreen can now just slap that feed in their feedreader

I inserted rotating ad banners for Play-Asia.com on just about every page... not because I make a ton of bucks off of Play-Asia, but because I wanted something pretty and new to look at on each page.

Both the individual and monthly pages have uniformly placed navigational arrows, so you can backpage through every single archive entry without moving your mouse. This will generate tons of extra pageviews for me, which, on the whole, I'd rather you spent on clicking Google ads. (Which pretty much remain where they have been, just now on a massive amount of new pages.) The new system means new URLs for the monthly archives and weblog entries, so I probably just broke the internet.

On that note, I expect a significant upturn in pageviews, simply because I increased the amount of pages here by a factor of a thousand. That's just math at work.

On the main page, there's been some fun improvements. The Shoutbox has a choice position; no more scrolling down to post quickie comments! The Shoutbox also has some custom smileys, which I've been using at every opportunity.

Top right is an iframe that combines pictures of Clark with the live home webcam and the random photo loader. It will default to Clark, but if you click the webcame or random tab, they will auto-reload every minute or so. Or force it with the Reload button. More unecessary pageviews! The random one is actually quite fun. I've been watching it for days as I tested it.

Bottom right is a brief list of other websites where you can find me, often repeating the same crap I say here!

On the completely-anal front, I changed most of my thin red lines from slightly-light-red to more-darker-red. The cat head icon I use everywhere has also been similarly re-redded. And I darkened the khaki background because on some really bright monitors, it would white itself out.

As I already mentioned, entry commenting requires a TypeKey account, which keeps spammers and robots from pissing me off. Years ago I had full unchecked open commenting, and I was spammed to hell constantly until I gave up and turned it off. TypeKey will cease all of that. I've seen plenty of other Movable Type-based weblogs that use TypeKey, so it's a well-respected service. It also lets me ban people. Cough.

It was quite a bit of fun to do this much reprogramming. The new Movable Type is really cool, even if their support pages suck. I did find that, whenever I was stuck on something, it was probably because I was overthinking it. It just would have been nice had they included a few "hey dummy this is really easy" instructional pages just to keep my confidence up. The biggest ordeal was reworking my old templates to take advantage of the new features, like the better search and the commenting stuff.

What's missing? The full page video game reviews are likely not going to return. I babble so much about games in the regular weblog that it has become redundant to formalize it. When I get around to it, I will dupe the reviews back inside the core weblog, and any future review-style writings will be found right here with everything else.

The card games page is still a mess, but whatever. I'm sure I'll isolate plenty of odd bugs and formatting quirks as I get used to the new layout. And I really need to polish up the mobile version.

I found a couple minor situations where the formatting was different between the Mac's Safari and Windows's IE. Guess which one I decided to favor? I think the biggest discrepancy there is that, on the PC side, you can't use the Reload button on my iframe thingy. Not sure why that is, but I am sure that I don't care. You PC guys can click from tab to tab if you're desperate to force a webcam reload, cancel or allow.

Once Nintendo releases the final Wii Internet Channel, then I'll decide if I want to forge some templates specific to the Wii. I probably will just because it's silly.