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Welcome, my friends, to the new, improved, Eye of the Goof!
I hope you dig my still garishly-colored, but oh-so much cleaner design and layout as much as I do. I will resume regular blogging shortly, so please bookmark this site, subscribe to my RSS feed, or tattoo the new URL on your nether-regions, and come back again to visit real soon.
The reality server is experiencing some administrative difficulties at the moment. We hope to have these issues resolved shortly. In the meantime, remain calm. In case of blog implosion, please form a single straight line and proceed to the nearest exit in an orderly fashion.
UPDATE: Well, that was fun. Our domain registration expired yesterday, and the reality users group had to scramble a bit to locate our admin so he could renew it before the grace period ran out. In the meantime, reality.sgiweb.org was hijacked intermittently by various squatters. As of this morning, the domain has been renewed through 2007, so hopefully things will get sorted out once the various DNS servers update their caches to stop pointing at the squatter sites. My apologies for any inconvenience, but this site is run by a loose confederation of volunteers who aren't on call 24x7, so as I like to say, "Feces Occur".
UPDATEtotheUPDATE: After the events of this past week, I've decided to move the Goof to my own shiny-new personal domain on a hosting service that has full-time tech support. It's going to take a while to make the switch, so there won't be any new updates here in the interim, but I'll let everyone know when I'm ready to open up shop on the new server. Thanks to all who inquiried about my status last week. Your support means a lot to me.
Be seeing you!
It only took me 7 weeks, but today I think I finally got the site comments straightened out after my upgrade to Movable Tripe 3.2 fuxxored them back at the end of December. The problem with not remembering commenter data turned out to be a bug in the way that MT handles cookies. I never did figure out how to get the pop-up comment window to work correctly, so I decided to just get rid of it altogether. Clicking on the comment link now takes you directly to the individual archive entry.
I really wish I'd added up all the hours I've spent fixing the problems this upgrade created. With all the missing code in the site templates, I find it very hard to believe that this release was tested in any kind of comprehensive or organized way prior to being unleashed on unsuspecting bloggers like me.
Unless you're reading my posts via an RSS aggregator, you've probably noticed that I made some significant changes to the site layout this weekend. I'd long been unhappy with how slowly my pages load due to the large amount of imagery, so I've eliminated much of it, and greatly reduced the size of what remains. It seems much faster to me now, hopefully, you'll agree.
I'm also planning to tweak the overall palette of the site to make the text more readable, although I've tried that before without much success. Seems my choice of background lends itself primarily to Halloween-y variations of orange-on-black. Guess I'll have to dig more deeply into my dimly-remembered graphic arts education to come up with something that fails to suck.
Now if I only knew how to clean up the dire state of my CSS templates without having to resort to days of tedious trial-and-error.