Readers who visit the web site, as opposed to getting it through the feeds, will notice a few changes, both cosmetic and architectural.
We’ll start with the obvious stuff. The blue header is a little bluer, the footer is fatter, and there are fewer entries per page.
There’s now an archive listing on every page of the site. This is by far the biggest change. [Certain people](http://www.davidanaxagoras.com/) have long pointed out the disgraceful lack of accessible archives for the site.
I feel that archive navigation isn’t really that crucial for most blogs. Odds are, a reader visiting your site doesn’t want to poke around to see what you really thought of Miss Congeniality 2. That’s not to say they shouldn’t be able to, it’s just that most blogs are about what’s happening today, not a year ago.
Archives are history. Most people just don’t care.
That said, johnaugust.com doesn’t function quite like most blogs. A reader stumbling across this site is likely to be interested in screenwriting, and is likely to have specific questions that I’ve addressed in earlier entries. The ability to easily wander through the 500+ posts is a huge advantage, and the new archive structure will (I hope) make this possible. Try it out, and see what you think.
There’s also a new “Recently” section beside the archives list. Off-Topic, which used to be its own page, is now part of the same footer package on every page. It’s still powered by [del.icio.us](http://del.icio.us), which has made it ridiculously easy to add a link-roll. (The old way involved cron scripts and cache files; the new way means cutting-and-pasting two lines of javascript.)
The new footer is hugely inspired by [Hemingway](http://warpspire.com/hemingway), a terrific and spare theme designed by Kyle Neath. I’m calling my version “Bradbury,” which is a lame and obvious pun.
The boring and invisible change is that I’ve upgraded to the most recent version of [WordPress](http://wordpress.org), which is faster, slicker, and one hopes resistant to [evil little script kiddies](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2005/what-happened). I’ve actually had the new version running for a while on a mirror site, and it’s proved to be very stable.
If I were a Proper Designer who really thought things through carefully, I’m sure I could come up with a full rationale for why everything is the way it is on the site. I can’t. Some of it is just that way because I like it. But your feedback is always welcome.
And yes, there’s a part two. Soon.