Because it is. In over fifteen years, I've gone through eight full-on site redesigns. Mostly because they tended to suck. That last look started in 2005, so I must have liked it substantially more than the six designs that preceded it, mathematically.
This time, I started with a stock Movable Type template and then tore into the customization. For years, I've built this thing from scratch, but the cooler coding is definitely way beyond what I feel like comprehending. That's why my commenting has been weird for years, among other mishaps. Now that I have templated code cooking under the hood, I hope comment logins will go smoother and not be irritating and inconvenient.
I had a major goal in mind to have a site that would look good with shorter posts. I'd like to not ramble as much, and aim for a more frequent post rate with smaller articles. I felt like I needed a new design to handle that.
The other Big Deal is that I installed a Twitter hack that automatically incorporates whatever silly crap I post to Twitter on the main fourhman.com page almost as if it is a real weblog entry. Although I jerked the code around so that the tweets do not fall in alongside the monthly archive pages, because that seems weird to me.
I jettisoned a lot of the cruft that had built up over the years... no more category listings for dead "franchise" articles, no more randomized Hiptop photos, and I'm this close to dumping the Link Farm. The only reason it is still here is because I end up using it as personal bookmarks when I'm on an unfamiliar machine.
There's still plenty of further tweaking ahead. Still some stuff I want to return to life (like the PSN Trophy box), and I need to remove a lot of obsolete files from my server. I'm just glad it all went so well. Usually my adventures in Movable Type are full of steaming ash and hot pokers, but this was pretty much a single day's work.
And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I found the time to order a wicked TaleSpin t-shirt.
Note the Facebook Like button up top. I think those things have become the 2011 version of the Rolling Hit Counter, so click it and make me feel appreciated.
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