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.

Created in Photoshop CS2.

Update: Fixed them up a bit and made it available for download (if ya really want it :P).

[download]

I’m so excited! After months of waiting, Verizon FiOS is finally available in my area. The Verizon guys have been here for the past few months installing and connecting cables, and it just today it has become available. I will probably be getting the 15mb/2mb plan (which completely owns my 6mb/768kb Comcast line at the moment). Insane BitTorrent speeds, here I come!

Also, on a side note, check out the spiffy new archive page I installed. Good for exploring content quickly (no refreshing of the page!). Still working on it a bit though.

I’ve been too long, I’m glad to be back
Yes I’m let loose from the noose,
That’s kept me hangin’ about
I been lookin’ at the sky ’cause it’s gettin’ me high,
Forget the hearse, ’cause I’ll never die
I got nine lives, cat’s eyes
Each and every one of them and running wild
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Gosh, I haven’t blogged in forever. It’s been a long while since I last updated this site (7 months ago, maybe?), so it’s strange seeing that people are still visiting here (according to Awstats, at least). But I’ve lately I’ve have more free time, so I decided why not, I should bring the ‘ole blog back!

I’m still in the progress in restoring it to it’s once old glory, but it’s taking much longer than I had expected. I never realized how much stuff I really had on here. The old blog had a ton of tweaks to Wordpress, but for some reason I can’t find a recent enough backup to get everything exactly the same, so I’ll have to continue redoing it all. So far the theme of the blog has come along nicely (should be nearly the same) and I am currently working on the forums and the sub-pages. Don’t have an ETA on anything yet, but not to worry, I will still be posting nonetheless! Should be basically the same content as before (hacking, computers, news, etc.), so no worries there.

If you haven’t notice, I decided to, rather than continue with where I left off content-wise, start a completely new database. The archives of the old blog can be found at http://rv2.org/blog. It is the most recent backup of the old database I had (May 17th, 2005). I created it to make it easier for the search engines searches to this site that linked using the old website structure (http://rv2.org/blog/ vs. http://rv2.org/). Search engine finds to this site will no longer direct to dead links if they were looking for something located on the blog (unless the posts were after May 17th, 2005). If you are looking for something from a while ago, make sure to check it out (you can find a clickable link on the side if you are too lazy to copy and paste! :P)!

That’s about it! It’s always good to be back!