Basically, I was looking to do a redesign and purge a bunch of outdated content. I also wanted to divorce some of my personal content from my professional image. I've also gotten a few complaints from my friends that they have ceased to understand any of what I'm talking about. I've had TerrenceRyan.com for awhile, and figured it was time to put it to use.

Part of the move was also a switch to Mango Blog from MovableType. I have to say AsFusion have done a great job with it - it's so easy to configure and customize.

Anyway, switch over, and for those that like my personal nonsense there should be more of it coming. For those of you looking for CF information more is coming on that front too.

The new backend it very cool. It took me a little getting used to, but now that I've got the hang of it, I'm extremely pleased. There's a lot of new features, and I'm looking forward to giving them all a try.

From the start I decided to do it a little different. First I did a site map, figuring out how all of the content was laid out in my site. I figured out that a few sections were extraneous, so I excised them, and consolidated others.

Then I did a wireframe. I figured out that I wanted a 4 column layout. I wanted navigation to be a vertical list on the left. I wanted a side "ad" or high attention section like before. I also wanted a fixed layout. I need to brand on to my hands "You don't design liquid layout sites that you yourself like" so I stop trying to do one.

Once all that was done I started working on a design. I started first by letting go of all of the previous colors in the site. Instead I looked for a pretty neutral palette. (I've been watching too many home flipping shows.) Once I had something I liked, I went back and added some color.

Finally, I decided on fonts, specifically, I picked Calibri to be the main font of the site. I know it's a Vista font and most people don't have it yet, so I've gone back and made sure it looks okay in Verdana and Helvetica. One thing I don't like about Calibri is that it's decidedly smaller at a given font-size than Verdana, or Arial. I'm sure someone who knows something about fonts could tell you exactly why. I am not that person.

Once the design was done, I found that I could do a few other things that I had wanted to do for a while:

• I incorporated Google Co-op powered search. Which is awesome if you haven't played with it.
• I added my latest blog content to the static sub sections of my site. RSS rocks.
• Got the download footprint of the site to be next to nothing.

I have few other things left to do, like prune away all the old sections of the site, but for the most part I'm done.

I tried to install a MovableType Image Captcha component... It completely fragged my MovableType install, and I had to blow it away and reinstall. I bet this wouldn't have happened to me if I was a good ColdFusion developer and started to use Blog.CFC.

After getting everything back up, I installed the Comment Challenge text-captcha plugin. It's accessible, and it doesn't, you know, completely hose my site, but I'm not sure how effective it will be. If anyone runs into any problems commenting, please drop me a line via my Contact page.

• Click the Big Button thing on the top left (they have a name for it, but I can't remember it. )
• Chose New
• When the New Document interface comes up chose "New Blog Entry"
• The stripped down blogging version of Word will appear.
• Chose Manage Accounts on the ribbon.
• Create a new Account.
• Enter the username and password you use to blog.
• For API Chose "Metaweblog"
• Point the post url to your mt-xmlrpc.cgi file
• If your blog admin file is http://www.someblog.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt.cgi this file would be at: http://www.someblog.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-xmlrpc.cgi
• It should ask you which Blog you wish to edit, and you're done.

Note that it doesn't handle categories, and I don't think it will handle posting notifications, so I typically chose to "Publish as Draft" which is available by clicking the small triangle under the "Publish" command on the ribbon. Once that is done, I use Movable type to add categories, and publish. I recommend you do the same. The way I see it, this isn't too bad because Word gives me excellent spell checking, grammar checking and undo. This all speeds up my blogging process immensely.

I also recommend you install the NaughtyWordChars plugin from Andy Yaco-Mink, as "smart quotes" might screw up your blog entries.

Update: It doesn't handle categories, or setting the text formatting properly, but you can 'publish as draft' which might just work well enough for me to use it.

To that end, I installed MT-Notifier from Everitz Consulting. If you would like to subscribe to a particular post, just check the "Subscribe to This Entry" box on the individual entry page. You have to confirm your desire to do so, but then you're in business.

You see, I don't suffer from delusions that everybody is eager to subscribe to Aarrggghh!!. However occasionally people ask questions in my comments, and I'm never sure what the etiquette is. Do I email them back, or do I just comment back and let them find it when they feel like it? Now, I don't have to worry, the reader can make that decision for themselves.

It is now 10 minutes until midnight, where midnight is defined as creation of a real world Running Man show.

I've removed Sifr. Not because of a problem with the technology, just because I didn't need it.

Explore. Enjoy. If anything looks wrong (or I didn't format for your browser) drop me a line.

Expect to see the redesign within a week or two, and the Christmas movie in about a month. Also expect a new cigar review within a day or so - because it's alternative happy hour Thursday again.

I know a bunch of you, especially the ones that comment a lot (Scott, Dan, Becky, Ryan, obviously Janice ) But who are the rest of my readers?

After subtracting all the search engines. I average about 200-250 visitors a day. Many of them are people searching for pictures of wisdom teeth, pictures of Eeyore, or pictures of hair cut before and after shots. They are a bit creepy. However, I really hope the sum total of my readership does not consist of wisom teeth fetishists.

So drop a comment, and let me know who you are.

This was about something larger that Weyrich seems to miss. A larger group of people than the circle of traditional media editors decided this story was important. They then advocated it, and brought it to mass consciousness. Weyrich is somehow attacking the story as not important as the blogosphere made it out to be. It's his right to say that, but then again, his magazine recently did an expose on the nuances of the Philadelphia accent. So I don't get where he thinks he's got the grivitas to decry our issue as trivial.

• The Billing Gazette
• The Charlotte Observer
• The Austin American-Statesman

This in addition to the three other spots I listed earlier, and in addition to the original article.

All in all this has taught me one thing: If I ever start a newspaper, I will eschew "Inquirer," "Times," or "Post." Instead I will start the "Philadelphia American-Statesman!"

Consequently I'll be highlighting a couple of my favorite places to grab a smoke in Philly over the few weeks. I say "Bars in Which to Have Cigars" instead of "Cigar Bars," because most of the bars are just places that happen to let you smoke cigars, not full fledged cigar bars. The first bar I chose to highlight is perhaps the highest quality place to go (and the only real cigar bar on the list). It might not be a great value, but I will get to good values in later entries.

If anyone has any recommendations, please let me know.