The changes:

• Retiring the Redoable theme from Dean J. Robinson. It had a good run – August 2007 to November 2008 – but modifying the php to implement the many tweaks was making maintenance more difficult. With the deprecation of plugins I was using in my Wordpress 2.2 installation, it was time to move on to a theme that would be more extensible.
• The new theme is Thesis from Chris Pearson. With what I was hoping to implement, it made sense to move to this theme as it’s best quality is the ability to use hooks to mostly eliminate the need to touch the core theme files. So far, it’s been well worth the $87.
• Gone is the middle sidebar, bringing this site back to a cleaner, more manageable two-column layout. As much as I liked having the sideblog in the middle column, it became really annoying to keep the text of each headline and comment to one line each to keep the clean aesthetic. The sidenotes are now asides and will appear inline, allowing me the freedom to write as little or as much as like.
• Gone as well is the monthly calendar from the sidebar – it was just taking up too much space. Also gone is LiveSearch – we’ll all just have to do with typing in a search term and pressing ‘Enter’ to perform the query. Tough, I know.
• Making it’s way over from the old musicblog is the inclusion of recently listened to tracks in the sidebar. Once again, you’ll all be able to see the eclectic selection of music I listen to.

See you all after Labor Day!

My Twitter updates can be viewed on the sidebar. It’s a mixture of stream-of-consciousness and what I’m currently up to.

With Hunka Hunka approaching, I’ve put up a “site” for it. It’s not really a new site since it’s actually just another category on this blog but posts in that category have been styled for the new theme.

I’ve added a Tumblelog to the site – it’s powered and hosted by Tumblr but I’ve styled it to look like the rest of the site. It’ll be updated frequently with whatever photos, videos, and audio that I tumble upon. Give it a look, will you?

You’ll notice the huge banner for the Barack Obama campaign. I’ll come right out and say it – I’m voting for the guy and will proudly support his campaign on this site.

There’s now a Colophon page that describes this site in some detail as well as what its goals are.

With the addition of the Colophon page, the About page has been deprecated as a sub-page of Colophon.

As I’ve always said – this site is a continuing learning project for me and, as such, will continue to evolve as I look for ways to improve it. Stick around and see what comes next.

I’ve moved The Wong Way and Photo A Day into the archives. As far as Photo A Day goes, it was an easy decision to take it off the menu as it’s clearly been abandoned and I have absolutely no plans to resurrect it. The Wong Way is another matter entirely as that site was my baby for the latter half of 2006 and it’s really hard to retire it. So for now, I’ll steal a sentiment from Junior Seau and say that The Wong Way has been graduated and not retired.

There won’t be any more scanned photos on Sundays until October at the earliest. I originally worked on them as a way to get past the post-baseball blues – yes, I realize that sounds strange and somewhat pathetic. With baseball on the horizon, I’ve decided to make those posts a seasonal thing. Look for their return when the Mets season comes to an end. I’m hoping they won’t show up sooner than November this time. By the way, look for a new regular Sunday component to replace the scanned photos when April rolls around.

Justin and Gordon have started up a beer blog component to their Jerkwater Brewing site. I’ll be posting there occasionally with stories of beer drinking and tales of my attempts of cooking with beer. My posts can be easily accessed at my author link but you should give the whole blog a look as they’re posting some great stuff over there.

That’s it for now. Keep checking the site out for photos and snarky sidenotes. I swear the sidenotes will never leave this site!

I was also very tired and I got pretty sick. Nothing too serious – just the flu – but it took me forever to recover.

I’ve taken a break from going to shows, at least in such great numbers or frequency. Yeah, I still go but I don’t bring my camera with me, choosing instead to stand in the pack and just enjoy the show.

I’ve transferred the content from the original site over to this one and they can be found on The Wong Way section. Most of the content has been migrated over though I’m still tweaking the site to make it work as it did. One bonus is that I’ve upped the resolution of the photos since the layout on this site is more accomodating of wider pictures.

My return to blogging comes complete with some changes:

• Retiring the old template – as much as I liked the one-column look of StripedPlus from The undersigned, it was very limiting as far as navigation goes. With the explosion of plugins and widgets for WordPress, I began to long for a more robust look.
• New template – enter Redoable from Dean J. Robinson. With a fairly wide fixed-width quasi-three-column structure, I’m able to blog photo-heavy posts without having to sacrifice image resolution.
• A new addition is the sideblog on the front-page. Even when I’m busy and don’t have the time to craft full blog entries, I like to blog posts when I come across something interesting. This usually comes in the form of a hot-linked post title with a short, usually snarky, comment.
• The main sidebar no longer has a listing of categories. In its place is a weighted tag cloud – the lighter the color, the more posts that have that tag. The idea is to be strict with the categories attributed to each post but to be fairly liberal with the tags being applied to each post.
• A monthly calendar now appears in the sidebar. It’s yet another visual representation of my posting history.
• The search box no longer requires you to submit a query. Instead, I’ve implemented LiveSearch which will show you search results as you type.

Well, it’s time to hit the ground blogging…