I’ve been meaning to upgrade my server for some time, but never had the motivation until last week’s problems arose. I’m very happy with the new server. It has improved specs across the board, and costs me half as much as the previous one.

Everything appears to be in order from my perspective. Depending on where you are located, DNS updates may take a couple days to propagate. If you notice anything that is broken, please let me know.

I used the opportunity to factor out some of the elements of the website into WordPress plugins. That involved some interesting under-the-hood work, resulting in a more modular and maintainable architecture, which appeals to my geek sensibilities.

In any case, you, the viewer of this site, shouldn’t notice any changes. (You may have to click refresh to bring down the latest code, however). If you notice anything that appears out of whack, please drop me a line.

As most people are aware, Flickr is an online photo sharing service. It has a lot of really nice features that make sharing photos both fun and easy. One of those features is the ability to post by email, which I’ve been doing from my BlackBerry Pearl.

I’ve arranged things so that only those photos that I post from my mobile phone show up in the widget. This keeps things in line with the other widgets on my site, which display a real-time feed of things that have my immediate attention.

My photos page will continue to display all photos, including those taken on a regular camera and uploaded later.

Last.fm is a social music recommendation service. When you listen to a song in iTunes, or any other popular media player, it is recorded in your profile. They’ve dubbed this action “scrobbling.” Based on other people with similar tastes, Last.fm recommends new bands and artists you’d likely be interested in listening to.

Now, via the wonders of scrobbling, a list of tracks I’ve recently played will appear in real-time on my website. Enjoy!

Twitter is a nice little service for posting short updates about what you are doing. You can send messages in by txting from a mobile phone, instant messaging from AIM or Google Talk, or posting on the web. Groups of friends can keep in touch by receiving notifications via any of those modes as well.

On the main page of this site, I’ve added Twitter to the sidebar. Now, whenever you visit, you’ll see the most recent statuses I’ve sent to Twitter. I think it will be a nice addition.

Design
The most apparent change to the website is, obviously, the new design. Lately I’ve been trying to follow a “less is more” philosophy, and that thinking has propagated through to the new layout. Less color and cleaner lines make the site, in my opinion, more visually appealing and, hopefully, easier to navigate.

Tags
I’ve dropped the use of categories to organize posts in favor of a tag-based approach. It’s a subtle distinction, but there’s a big difference. Categories have broad applicability, which can make it difficult to file entries under specific, well-defined topics. For example, a “Technology” category is almost meaningless when trying to located an archived article about Objective-C.

Tags, on the otherhand, take a more free-form, chaotic approach to organization. Instead of assigning a broad category, a few very specific keywords are applied. At first glance, it may seem counter-intuitive, but this technique actually makes it easier to file new articles and later retrieve them from the archives.

Spaces
As the Internet becomes more deeply ingrained into everyday life, our identities become prevalent online. I view this website as a place that represents myself to the networked world.

While this site is home to a journal of my public thoughts and ideas, I also keep information at other, external sites. For instance, I upload my photographs to Flickr and post bookmarks to del.icio.us. The Spaces section of this site contains links to the various profiles I maintain throughout the web.

That’s an overview of a few of the changes that have been made to this site. As I’ve stated, I am very pleased with the results, and will be further improving them going forward. I am also looking forward to writing future articles. Enjoy!