YouTube founder Chad Hurley has confirmed that his team is working on a revenue-sharing mechanism that would “reward creativity”. He said the system would be rolled out in a couple of months and use a mixture of advertisements, including short clips shown ahead of the actual film. #
It’s a little bit late, but I finally made the jump onto the tagging bandwagon. Earlier, I’ve been using categories to organize my blog, but with the help of the Wordpress plugin, Ultimate Tag Warrior, the transition to tags could not have been easier. All I had to do was install the plugin and tell it to mirror the current posts’ categories into tags. This saved an enormous amount of time as I would have had to re-tag all the old posts. After that, I got rid of the categories I currently had and made new ones- Bulletins for site related news, Clippings for the asides, Headlines for blog posts more detailed than asides, Journal for posts related to me and Photos for any photos I put up. ELA supports tagging right out of the box, so now my live archives have been changed to reflect the new tagging system.
What are the advantages of tagging over categories you ask? First, the blog is much more organized and allows the readers to find what they want even faster. Second, tags help add some exposure to your blog. Technorati supports tags and most search engines crawlers understand it as well. It’s never hurts to try to attract more readers. 
It’s been a good two years since any drastic design changes have been made on this blog. After hours of work, spending most of it with Photoshop, Transmit and the Web Developer Extension Toolbar, I bring you a brand new version of reinvented. Overall, the look is the same, but there are a lot of changes under the hood which dramatically improve upon the original reinvented.
The biggest change is clearly the switch from a two column to a one column layout. The second column was taking space that should have been used for the content, so I got rid of it (The archive links are already available on the archives page and it was unnecessary to have them there twice. The links to other blogs have been removed as I didn’t really find much use for them, but I’ll probably add them onto another page some time later. My desktop picture has been moved to the section at the bottom.). Also new is the slider at the bottom, which, when you press the button, slides out a few things (desktop and movie reviews) that might be interesting, but don’t have to been shown unless the reader wants to see them.
Also changed are the graphics on the page. The size of the images have been optimized and reduced significantly in size (many of them have been cut by 1000%) and should speed up the loading of the page. The header has also been made 20% smaller for a cleaner look.
Fonts are now more coherent with the rest of the page. Before different fonts would be used for everything (titles would be trebuchet ms, while in posts it would be verdana, and tahoma for comments), but now I’ve made it more unified with the default being lucida grande (mac only) and the alternative font is verdana. The unified font as well as making it larger was done to make content easier to read for those with extremely high resolution monitors.
There are also dozens of very small changes I’ve made around the place that I don’t remember. The theme should work well with Firefox, Safari, and IE 7 users, but I still need to fix some problems occurring in IE 6. Since this current layout is very different from the original reinvented, I’m considering packaging the original reinvented theme into a free download. All I’d have to do is make a few changes that will make it work right out of the box, but I’m not sure if I have time to do that. If I get enough requests I’ll probably find sometime this month and release it.
I know I haven’t updated in a while since I’ve been real busy. I probably won’t be updating too often for the next few months, but I will occasionally, just not everyday. I do, however, plan on changing the layout. I’m getting tired of the current two-column layout I have and will probably be tweaking it to a single column layout with the unimportant stuff on the bottom of the blog which leaves more room for content. Maybe a few other changes to make the page easier to read as well.
On a side note, Apple finally released the rumored iPhone today. The technology looks very innovative, but at that price, I won’t be buying one anytime soon.
