I started tin­ker­ing around with a new site design about a year ago. Once school started though, I didn’t really have the time to fin­ish it. This sum­mer, I’ve finally had enough free time to fin­ish what I’d started, as well as to expand on my ini­tial plan some­what. It’s not com­pletely done — there are a few bugs left to work out — but I felt that it was far enough along to go live. So please poke around, tell me what what you like, what you don’t like, what seems not to be work­ing, what could be bet­ter (and if you’re look­ing at this in an RSS reader, click through to see the new site).

I’ve built this on the lat­est ver­sion of Mov­able Type Open Source, and have taken advan­tage of some of its cool fea­tures and plu­g­ins. Rather than using cat­e­gories, all my entries are now tagged with rel­e­vant key­words. In the left side­bar, you can find a tag cloud which shows all of these key­words with font sizes pro­por­tional to their fre­quency of usage. Click­ing on one of these tags will take you to a list of all entries that bear that tag.

At the bot­tom of the right side­bar, you’ll see a sec­tion enti­tled “Recent Activ­ity.” This replaces the “My del.icio.us” sec­tion from my pre­vi­ous site, and pulls in links I’ve shared on del.icious, Digg, and Google Reader, and videos I add to my favorites on YouTube.

My photo gallery looks much the same, but now click­ing on a photo thumb­nail (but not an album thumb­nail) opens a Slim­box layer rather than tak­ing you to a new page. Once the Slim­box layer is open, you can nav­i­gate through the album with your arrow keys.
I have a cou­ple of other things in the works, and if I ever get a chance to fin­ish them, I’ll let you know about them.

I’ve been neglect­ing the site recently, but with good rea­son — I’ve been work­ing on a new ver­sion. It’s near­ing com­ple­tion, and I hope to have it up some­time this week or next. Check back soon for the long-overdue newness…