You should notice a few additional new features on our site: a blog search engine, a link to our archives, and the ever-popular “permalink” notation on each blog entry.

The search engine can be found towards the bottom left part of the page. You might have to scroll to see it, but we opted to keep it that way as putting it on top of the page caused some of the links to scroll off of the screen. To use it, simply type in whatever you’d like to search for, and hit enter. The screen will refresh and display excerpts from any entries in our blog that match your search word. You will then be able to navigate directly to those entries.

The archive link can be found on the top left part of the page. It will take you to a page that displays different groups of previous blog entries: category-based, date-based, and individual. You can use this to see, for example, all of the entries from October 2002, or all of the entries related to Food.

Finally, the permalink is provided in each entry for the purposes of linking directly to a given entry on our site. So if you would like to mention a specific entry from our blog in your blog, email, IM, or whatever, you can now use our permalink. Easy-peasy!

All of these changes, and many of the other new features that were introduced with our new format, are a direct result of my reading up on ***MovableType|http://www.movabletype.org/***’s feature set and template system. I’ve done a lot more as far as correctly implementing links, using more of MT’s built-in features where I had previously been doing hacks, generally getting more out of the system.

We hope that you enjoy all of these changes, and as always, share any comments with us via the commenting system!

It is true, World Wide Wood has molted and regrown a new and improved skin! There is no need to adjust your monitors.

We decided that after a year and a half it was probably time to give the ole website a new look. Cleaner, fresher, just different. A couple weeks ago we asked for suggestions for change and have attempted to incorporate these suggestions.

Anyone who knows me well will know that I don’t usually deal well with change. I get attached to things (backpacks, sneakers, pillowcases, websites) and go through heart wrenching episodes while I transition to the new.

I hope you enjoy the new look and layout. If there are any out there, like me, who need to revisit the old look you can see it ***here|http://prwdot.org/index.old.php***

Howdy, Loyal Readers!

Peter and I have been toying with the idea of redesigning this here website. It’s not that we think there’s anything wrong with how it is now, it just feels like it might be time for a change.

We are looking to you for suggestions. What do you like about World Wide Wood? What don’t you like? Is there anything that you’d like to find here? Do you visit any of our links? Would you like us to add different links? Do you like the red?

Okay, I think you get the idea. Drop us an email or leave a comment and let us know what you think. And be standing by for the new and improved World Wide Wood.

Also we’d like to welcome ***Amy Walton|http://waltondammerunprwdot.org/g/*** to the list of people hosting their blogs at prwdot.org, and note her presence in the links in the right hand nav bar.

The addition of Amy marks the fifth person formerly or currently from Mount Vernon to have their website hosted on our site, including myself. I love the fact that five Mount Vernonites have websites hosted on a server that is physically in the New York City metro area, run by a company that is headquartered in California. Isn’t the Internet wonderful?

Made a few tweaks to the site recently:

* Home page will now show the last 10 blog entries instead of just the last 5.
* Individual Entry Archives (which you can get to by clicking on the time at the end of each blog entry) are now displayed correctly. An error in their layout was causing the pages to look jumbled.

Also, if you have been looking for particular photos in the photo gallery, and have not been able to find what you were looking for, please contact me and let me know what specifically you are trying to find. I’ll do my best to make sure you can see the photos you need to see.

I’ve made a few changes to the site. If the page looks weird, please let me know. I’ve tested my changes out on quite a few browsers, thanks to ***BrowserCam|http://www.browsercam.com/***, but it doesn’t cover absolutely everything.

In summary, here are the changes:

qqq|* Eliminated “tables” as a method of laying out the page. Tables are still useful for displaying tabular data, but for too long they have also been used as a layout tool. They were never intended as such, and so now I am using “div” tags to lay out and style all of the data on the site. This is probably the biggest change, and is the one likely to cause the most problems if you’re using a weird (or old) browser.

* Condensed the site’s stylesheet, removing redundant tags, collapsing some tags together, and adding some new tags for clarity.

* Made sure the code of at least the homepage was compliant with the ***XHTML 1.0 Strict|http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/*** specification for structured documents, and the ***CSS 2.0|http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/*** specification for document style sheets. This won’t be a visible change for most, but it should ensure that our site will work in the browsers of the future. You can check the compliance of individual pages using the links you will now find if you scroll to the bottom of the page.

*Re-separated the photo gallery from the flow of the site. Hopefully this will be faster and less confusing to people who come to the site just to see the photo gallery. As the gallery continues to grow and grow (it now holds 2,734 photos!), I believe it’s important to keep it more separate. Some day it may even need its own server!|qqq

That’s about it. These changes should make it easier for us to alter the style of the site, as well as (hopefully!) make it look better to everyone.

Becky and Jenn are down on Martha’s Vineyard for the day and the evening, so I’ve been keeping myself busy by updating the website and doing other geeky things.

I’ve made some significant improvements to the blog archive system. Now when you browse individual entry archives (you can get to those by clicking on the post time at the bottom of each post), it doesn’t look like a mess. I also cleaned up the ***MovableType|http://www.movabletype.org/*** templates, removing some things that didn’t need to be there, and adding some things that did. Speaking of MT, I also upgraded to the latest bugfix release, 2.64.

I also rewrote the way content is displayed on the site. Previously, the index script would simply read a file in, and print it to the screen. Now, however, the file content is read in to PHP, sent through a parsing process, and finally printed out on the main index page. What this means is that I can do things to the content of the page before it is displayed on the site. For example, I created a method for writing URLs in a blog entry – by simply surrounding a url with two sets of “***” and including the name of the link, and the URL of a link, the link will automatically be converted, and the proper link class will be written. This saves Becky and I from having to type in the whole long url. 🙂

Recently I’ve been toying around with ***Fink|http://fink.sf.net/*** on my Mac systems. Fink is a system that closely resembles the ***Debian|http://www.debian.org/*** apt package management system. It automates and simplifies the act of downloading, compiling, and installing open source software. While I do occasionally get a kick out of manually downloading a program’s source, configuring it, patching bugs, and installing it, it really is much easier to just let this program do it all for you. 🙂 An example of a very useful program I’ve installing using Fink is ***The Gimp|http://www.gimp.org/***. The Gimp is an open source alternative to Adobe’s ***Photoshop|http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/main.html***. It has most of the same features as Photoshop, but the most important difference is price – Photoshop is $599.95, and The Gimp is $0000000.00. I’ll take The Gimp, please!

Thanks for letting me fill up this blog with tech talk. Maybe Becky will chime in soon with some news and views. 🙂

In a dramatic turn of events yesterday, the prwdot.org servers and personnel were spared from ***Blackout 2003|http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/08/15/power.outage/index.html***. The prwdot.org server is actually located in Parsippany, New Jersey, which, although close to the NYC metro area, was not hit by the outage. In addition, the state of Massachusetts was almost entirely spared from the outage, as was most of northern New England. Parts of western Mass. and Vermont were hit, however.

There were also reports that some parts of Mount Vernon, Ohio were affected by this outage. In particular, some houses on the east side of the city were without power from approximately 4 p.m. to 8 p.m., while other parts of the city remained fully powered.

Thank you for your concern, and we now return you to your regularly scheduled website.

If you are an observant person you may have noticed that there is a new link in the blog list. oe 1999.

This blog is a group blog started by a few of my comrades from Oregon Extension 1999 in Lincoln, Oregon. I don’t know if it is going to be of interest to anyone who wasn’t there with us, but who knows…you might read some really cool things that inspire you to read something new or to look at an issue from another point of view.

So, check it out if you want to.