Well, it took six months, dozens of paper designs, hundreds of hours at the internet cafe, and thousands of individual changes - but version 11.0 of my website is finally official and live, and now being found at what will be its permanent location (at the root of my website, jasonpettus.com, that is). And if I'm not mistaken, just about everything you see listed here at the desktop and mobile versions should be working perfectly - the main menu (seen in the black bar at the top of the page - more info about me and this site, contact info, a map to this entire site, etc); the mobile and print links; all feed options, including the feeds for specific categories and the email notification list; the itinerary page and Paypal link for my South Africa tour; the entirety of the Jason Pettus Online Repository of Life Experiences™, and all the options that come with that (master list by date, master list by category, info pages for all categories, individual archive pages, etc); and of course everything else you see mentioned, most of which has been working for several weeks now in beta form.

Whew! Unsurprisingly, all this new work has had me thinking a lot these days about the overall history of my website, which of course makes me laugh each time I do, at the thought of just how quickly blog technology has progressed in such a short amount of time. I mean, just look at the history of me updating the look of this site - of the 11 distinct versions that have now existed, 10 of them came during the first three years of the site's history, with a three-and-a-half year gap between the last update and this one. And the reason, of course, is that just up to a couple of years ago, the only way to do a personal journal on the web was to do it like I've been doing it for the last six and a half years - by programming it by hand, one HTML page at a time, and uploading it one page at a time whenever there's a change. And so that's the reason behind the quick slowdown of updates at my site, just because of the sheer volume of handmade code changes involved; switching from version 2 to 3, for example, back in spring of 1999, involved hand-changing 300 HTML pages (which even at the time I thought was ridiculously labor-intensive), while switching from version 9 to 10 involved hand-changing something like 2,500 pages.

Even five years ago, it didn't occur to me to complain that much about handmade changes; I was just happy to have the opportunity in the first place to do an online journal, and have the audience and adventures I did as a result. But now, just a month after being on this MovableType automated system of mine, I already can't believe how much extra work I voluntarily chose to put into my site back then, each time I wanted to change something, and now can't even imagine myself using such a laborious system again.

This is not a ridiculous amount of time we're talking about - to put it in perspective, for example, this site first went live around the time CSI first hit the airwaves. But in the insanely ramped-up timeline that exists on the web, of course, these six and a half years now seem to make me this wizened old man when it comes to blogging, a veteran who wistfully thinks back sometimes on the good ol' days, back when it was difficult to explain exactly what a 'blog' was in the first place, and people didn't even take the idea seriously of a website advertising on television.

Granted, this sudden 'old-skool' status of mine doesn't matter much of a damn this particular moment, now that hardly any of my archived material has yet to be imported into my new website database. But come Christmas or so, I'm hoping that this site will be a profoundly impressive example of just what the fuck I've been doing with my life over the last ten years; by that point there will hopefully be around one million words stored in this database (between my journal and all the old literary work I used to do, like my poetry, essays, etc), 600 or so photos, a couple of dozen audio files, a couple of dozen electronic books, even a few video files. And with me now having the power to categorize all this old material before you even see it, so that it can be presented to you in a much more intuitive way, I'm hoping that this site will become not only the source of day-to-day entertainment like it's always been, but also a place for people to increasingly look up specific information as a whole - travel tips to Germany, for example, royalty-free images of Chicago I publish under a Creative Commons license, tutorials on web programming, etc etc.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it'll be nice, I think, when the import process is finally finished here, and I will have just this massive database of archived material, a hefty documentation of just what exactly I've been doing with my life over the last ten years. And I'm hoping that this database will take on a new use, as I myself finish the transition into this second phase of my Chicago life (from that of an artist to that of a businessman), and my website becomes less of a showcase for my new work and more of a permanent repository for old material.

Anyway, so I guess that's the news for now - please feel free to go through this site piece by piece at this point, and to send as crazy-ass detailed a bug report that you feel like writing. Technically, of course, there are still some changes left to make, as of the exact second I'm posting this entry; I still need to establish the direct links to my feed found at the bottom of the desktop version, still need to put up "this site has moved" pages at Geocities, still have a half-dozen or so tiny little changes like these to make before I can go home for good today. But this will all hopefully be finished by a couple of hours from now, so anyone reading this in the evening or later should feel free to go around testing whatever they feel like. (To be clear, though - 1) category information pages are not created until there is officially at least one entry associated with it; and 2) I'm still fucking teaching myself the maddening way the search engine works in MT, which is why search-engine results still look like crap.) As always, I appreciate you being a daily reader of this site, given the two billion much more entertaining choices on the web you have instead; I thank you for checking in here on a regular basis, and hope that you will continue to do so, now that the new version of my journal is up at the same time that my life overall is taking these interesting turns.