I've spent the better part of the day re-writing the 160 articles that I currently have published. I spent a good deal of time trying to get into putting related links together, but that turns out to be a task best achieved in a series rather than all at once.
Remaining to get implemented are the vB/MT integration point, a home page implementation of the design, comment migration, an update to vbSEO, and the aforementioned related link management. Also, you may have noticed that some of the common static pages are just fillers for now.
I wanted to do a few things with this redesign, and the design itself was put together with the intention of being a repeatable and easily manageable structure for external publication efforts. With that in mind, I wanted something that would allow me to relate articles on an ad-hoc basis, so people can read further about things if they want to. I also wanted to be able to manage external links so that people have outside resources to reference for further information.
Along those same lines, I wanted better in-site link anchors, as I discovered that the out-of-the-box links that MT provides contain a lot of anchors like "continue reading" or "published on xxx date", etc.
Another goal was to have a real publishing interface as opposed to something that looks, acts, and smells like a blog.
I wanted to have something that inspires community interaction, and also something that can support some of my future plans.
Everything is falling into place. Although things aren't quite ideal, I do like the direction that I'm headed. Like the main page says, things are going to be a little shifty for a few days, but in the end I'm glad I pushed myself to get this done. Had I waited until everything was perfect, it would have taken me another 6 months.
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