I've got a number of updates to report today on the new design development - although like the last update, I have a lot less things to report than at the beginning of the process, as the various templates I'm designing slowly take on their final forms and looks. In fact, I think it's safe to say that I have almost nothing but "tweaks" to report on the site development anymore - that is, hardly any major changes are taking place at the site at this point, but merely small detailed work to get every single aspect of the site working exactly the way it's supposed to.

I guess the biggest news concerns the notification list - namely, I've gotten so frustrated trying to the MovableType (MT)-provided one that I have officially washed my hands of it. Jeez, man, talk about a surprisingly ineffective plug-in for a system full of elegant and well-documented ones; there's hardly any instructions for the notification system I was trying to use, all these weird code-heavy changes you have to make right to the system's Perl configuration file, and not a very good way to discover what you've done wrong, if it ends up not working correctly. So instead I've decided to try using a new company out there called Rmail, which does nothing but let people have RSS feeds delivered to an email address; this way my "notification" system is simply based on the RSS feed I already have broadcasting at my site, with no other technology or special programming needed. I've been testing it for the last two days, on both my Gmail account and my cellphone (via MMS picture messengering), and can report that it works perfectly on both, so for now I'm declaring the mailing list frozen and open for business - feel free to start signing up for it this second. (I'm also now using Rmail for the Jason Pettus Instant Locator™ as well, so feel free to start signing up for that too. By the way, I've also started including a list of well-known cellphone company email addresses on those pages as well, for those who might not know what their own is. I'm always looking for more - drop me a line if you know of any, especially in Europe, Australia and Asia.)

RSS/feed version: Still frozen, just like last time - I now have feeds running for RSS 2.0 (including a summary-only version, linked to at the beginning of this paragraph, and one for the full 2,000-word entries), RSS 1.0 and Atom. (That Atom feed, by the way, broadcasts both the summary and the full text; you choose in your RSS reader which version you'd like to see. By the way part 2, if you're like me and confused over the differences between Atom and RSS, think of their relationship as much like the one Netscape and Microsoft Internet Explorer [MSIE] had in the 1990s - both are doing essentially the same thing, but are run by two different teams who don't exactly like each other, so both are busy adding new exclusive features to their service that the other doesn't have. This double-feed that Atom broadcasts is a good example - in RSS you can only specify that a feed broadcast one type of datastream or the other.) I've also read up on how to create RSS feeds for specific categories, which really couldn't be much easier in MT than it currently is; I'll be adding a couple of specialized feeds once the site is official, for niche subjects I think some readers might be interested in subscribing to exclusively - my latest photos, my latest audio files, the latest on my upcoming tour of South Africa, etc.

Print version: Still frozen like last time, although I've discovered that the "display URL" attribute I added doesn't work in MSIE. Wait a minute - something cool that works in every browser on the planet except MSIE? That can't be! Yet another reason to finally switch over to Firefox - you'll be glad you did.

Mobile version: Tantalizingly close to being finished! Changes in the last 24 hours include: "day" field at top of page now showing up in a better color, as well as the text in the sidebar boxes at the bottom (prompted by a complaint from my brother, who viewed it the other day in a Blackberry); different top photo now, so that people don't think the photo is only half-loading (again, prompted by an observation from my brother); and lots of tiny little changes to line-heights, paragraph marks and similar CSS fussiness. Like I said, this is maybe one or two changes away from being frozen now, and especially now that mobile readers are directed to desktop templates for everything at the site besides the main front page - it means that the mobile index template is the only mobile template I have to maintain, which means a lot less behind-the-scenes work for me. I've gotten surprisingly few feedback notes from fellow mobile readers, which I'm actively seeking right now, so thought I'd put a little appeal for them up here. What's this site looking like on a PocketPC? On Palms besides the Treo? On cellphones with web access? Let me know what's not working, and I promise to fix it if I can.

Desktop version: One day closer to being finished, thank God. Changes include: subcategories in the archive master list now being indented through percentage of total page instead of pixels, for better display on mobile devices; background image (that yellow globe you see at the bottom of the page) shrunk, to also better display on mobile devices; master list now up for all date-based archives as well; and lots and lots of tiny display changes in my CSS specifications.

The template module runaround I mentioned in the last update is now confirmed to be working perfectly; you can read the instructions in that entry to implement such a thing yourself. Almost all archive pages should be working now - the master list by category, the master list by date, each category's summary page, each month's summary page, and all individual entries. The only thing still looking funky is the search results page, because that in particular requires a lot more education than your usual archive templates; I hope to tackle that this week and finally have that last archive type working correctly soon. Anyway, this is all good news as far as the behind-the-scenes stuff with this site; it means that every time I have a slight change in the desktop template in the future, there will only be two things I need to update at my site (the Desktop Index template and the template modules), versus making the same slight change by hand in six different templates, which is how I was doing it before implementing my modules.

What all this means for the site as a whole is pretty big, actually - basically, that the development is proceeding even more quickly than it was before (which was already faster than I had been expecting it to go), meaning that the Grand Switchover (that is, the day I permanently shut down my Geocities page) could be happening in as little as two weeks from today. It could very likely be happening, in fact, which thrills me to no end, because it means I can get right back to finishing up my newest travel book and getting that out, and then finishing up the reorganization of all my old poetry books and starting to get them out, and then starting to import all my old journal entries and multimedia files to this new MT database of mine, so that by Christmas this site will hopefully contain all 2,000 or 3,000 or whatever pieces of online material I've created over the last ten years of my life (text, photos, audio, video and electronic books). Or, Christmas is the goal, anyway - as my actual experiences in the past sadly prove, God only knows if I'll actually meet this deadline or not.