And just like that, she was back.

I went away for absolutely ages - for that, I apologise. I wasn’t intending to be gone that long, and I won’t go into why (or where) I went, but I’m back now, and sporting a new design, as you might have noticed.

There’s been a whole lot of rejigging behing the scenes here. One of the notable differences is that the front page of meish.org now acts as a one-stop portal, featuring the latest from all of the activities on this site. So it’s easy to see from visiting just the front page that there are new words, mini posts, miscellaneous files or images.

The idea is that you could bookmark the front page, for a taste of everything, or you could bookmark the sub sections if you’re only interested in new images, for example. I haven’t got the RSS feeds flowing for everything properly yet, but will do at some point, I expect.

And speaking of images, there’s a new photolog over where the hodgepodge of random images used to be. The trouble with the old format, was that it featured various images sizes and shapes. Some pages had just one image on, others had twenty. It was a bit unruly, and not very easy to navigate. So I started afresh.

Some of the old pictures will be making a comeback, as I get around to resizing and reuploading, but for the moment, there are at least a dozen new ones you won’t have seen, including one or two from the wedding and honeymoon.

Also on the image front, on the main page, there’s a random display of images taken with the camphone. I’m looking at a way of automatically putting these into a gallery of sorts, but that may take a little figuring out. In the meantime, hit refresh to see small, fuzzy images of my commute to work, and other daily fun.

For the longest time, I’ve been longing for simplicity. Not just in terms of design (though it doesn’t hurt!) but also in terms of structure, content, code and execution. Online, as in life, my activities were being hampered by a layout/design/architecture which had resulted from modification after tweak after fiddle after tinker. In other words, the site was suffering from feature-creep from hell. It was carrying around with it the junk and poor decisions from previous incarnations, and let me tell you, that stuff gets *heavy* and rather tiresome after a while.

So I took this little break (alright, longer than anticipated - I got distracted by other things: life, mainly) in order to regroup a little, and refocus on what I wanted to get out of this presence, online. When I figured that out, I took the opportunity to look again at the site - code, architecture and content - and start afresh in certain places.

For example, the “blog” section containted over 4000 posts from 4 years of online wibbling. Half the links had rotted away. Most of the situations and feelings described therein were irrelevant to anyone except me, as a record of where I was in, say, April 2001. So I went through the old posts with a scythe, and carried forward to the new *words* section only that which was most relevant or which persisted through time and change. I also took the opportunity to combine the *blog* words with the, er, *words* words, because they’re both words, and the division didn’t really make sense.

One of the other changes you might notice is that the comment functionality has been removed from the site entirely. I might look at bringing it back at some point, in a different guise, but maintaining them (pruning out the spam and the lunatics) was more trouble than it was worth. I still appreciate hearing from people who visit this site, though, so speak up (you can guess the email address, I’m sure)!

Another groovy little addition is that the welcome message you see above can be hidden - just click the little “hide welcome message” link near the top of the screen. When you click that, a cookie is set on your browser, which means the next time you visit, you won’t see the welcome message, and can get straight on with the content. I figured you didn’t need to be inflicted with my gurning mug every time you stopped by…

Big thanks to my lovely husband for helping me fathom the indecipherable world of php cookies, as well as for CSS services above and beyond the call of normal marital existence. He also makes a mean cuppa, and I adore him. Thanks also to the lovely Derren (he’s in Australia, the lucky so-and-so) for being willing to provide inspiration when the well had completely run dry (which is another way of saying I couldn’t see the wood for the trees).