wait! what is this? where am i?
If I make a mild assumption and assume that none of you are blind, I can probably safely also assume that you have noticed that I have tweaked the layout of the page a slight amount. It is actually much more than is immediately obvious. I have taken the step of giving up on my home-brewed programming to run the site. This is somewhat of a major deal to me because my site has been basically 100% code that I have had written since late 1998. Erelas is now completely run by the WordPress codebase.
So why would have leave behind 8 years of custom code heritage and take up using a canned system that is probably used by over 50% of the blogs in the world at large? There are actually several reasons. First, my site was currently in a broken state. How I had gotten it there I am not sure, but there is was, and there it was going to stay unless I got it out. Secondly, WordPress does so much more than I would ever get around to writing myself. For instance, now you can look at categories, and search for text, and the backend that I use for entering stuff is just infinitly nicer that what I used before. Thirdly, I had originally started coding it myself because nothing was available of this quality and it was a good learning experience, and I have really learned all I was ever going to learn building a blog site. Lastly, and this is probably the most important, I find that now that I program for a living I am much less inclined to work 9 hour on programming and then come home and try to fix bugs on my site.
All is not completely lost. I can still customize the look completely and as often as I so choose. What you are seeing now I build over the last few days and it still has some tweaking to be done, but I wanted to get it out there so I could start posting again. Which brings me to the last thing, time that I now won’t be spending writing code for the site, I can use to write long posts like this one as well as bring you all kinds of links. I should warn you that I have a lot of stuff saved up from this past month. Check back often.