Well, this is an improvement over the old design. And I'm almost done.
Bear with me; there's a few things that are broken on IE, in all likelihood - I haven't got an IE to look at anything with, so I'm operating blind.
Some of it - like the canvas element - I'm not even going to try and hack around; the fact that there's an emulated canvas element doesn't mean I want to start trying to use it dynamically, in realtime, during the page's run time. I've worked hard to make sure that the alife sim, which is indeed ultimately eye candy, uses as little CPU as possible. I don't want to ruin that by running it through some kind of odd emulator for a browser that's so out of date that people have to hack it to support modern web features.
I swapped out all the old categories for tags, separated reviews content from core blog stuff and set up MediaManager to help with the management of the reviewing process; now all I need to do is go through my books and review them, which I've wanted to do for some time but never seemed to have the time for.
Hopefully, now that I've done the drudgework of getting all this crap set up, it should reduce the overhead in actually geting around to writing this stuff to the point where I don't mind doing it. :)
Tag clouds are in, thanks to CloudNine, which is fab, and a lot less useless. I've also gone through and done one of those evil things that I'm always telling companies never, ever to do - I've changed all the URLs, and zapped all the old archives, so that there's less duplication of content within the site. Conveniently, it should actually be better when crawled than the old system. :)
Also, the 3.33 upgrade finally happened, so I can reat easy knowing that l33t hax0rz won't descend on my shiny new site and rip it apart. Or, at least, pretend that being up to date is the same as being safe. :)
Outbound trackbacks will stay disabled until it's all done and dusted, which should be by Friday (20 Oct). I hope.
As for the rest? Well, it's got a real error page now for 404 content, and I've written in redirects for all of the URLs I so carelessly broke earlier today. I've also gone back and rewritten the tag urls for readability, so it doesn't look quite as... evil... as MT's default configuration makes it.
Really, all that's truly left is the "about me" section, and that's going to take some time. I've got projects to write up, my CV to convert to sensible HTML, I've got to find a photograph where my hair isn't the out-of-control freakshow it is right now. (I'm growing hair for the first time in god knows how many years - so at the moment, it's... a little untamed.)
But it's a good start to work from. For the first time in a long time, I think I've got this site under my thumb. :) The improvements to Movable Type have helped immensely; it's much less... frustrating to work with than in previous versions. I feel like I'm wasting less time. Admittedly, that's probably just perception. :)
Update: Just been sent a screenshot of IE crashing violently and rendering crud; which is probably a combo of canvas tag + JS and non-IE-friendly CSS. Installing a WinXP virtual imagee now to have a look for myself; guess this day was eventually going to come. It's the single biggest reason I want one of the new macs - Parallels would be a joy compared to running this stuff in emulated x86 environments like Q.app. That's life, I guess.
