Rough Draft

Long Month

Wow, so all of April went by without a single post from me on this site. First time I've had a whole month go by without a single post. I was insanely busy at work all of March and April and made two trips (Cleveland and Las Vegas). I managed to make it to a couple concerts as well. I'll definitely be posting more on all of these things in the near future.

But for now I've spent the last couple nights doing some work on the site, prompted by a post made by Josh. I've started to revamp the sidebar, although there's still some things I want to change about it. I removed the Recent Entries as they didn't serve a lot of purpose since they are all on the main page and my posts aren't insanely long. I also moved the Monthly Archive links to an Archives page since that too was just eating up space without a whole lot of usefulness. In the same style as Jeff I added a Navigation section to the sidebar. This gives quick access if you do want to browse through the monthly archives or the categories. The Navigation section also points to the newly created About Me and Contact Info. pages. The last thing I added to the sidebar is a Music Recommendations section. I plan to update this every few weeks as I come across new albums and "songs of the moment". The album links point to the iTunes Music Store if it's available there while the song link either points to the ITMS or PureVolume if the song is available there for free. The artist link points to that artist's homepage.

Other small changes I've made include making links blue and visited links gray. Before all links were a light gray which was unnecessarily difficult to see on the white background, so changing them to blue made links stand out more without them needing to be underlined. Visited links are now gray, but a gray that is a bit darker and easier to read. I also revamped the "Posted..." tag that appears at the bottom of each post. Previously clicking on the time took you to the permanent link which was rather non-intuitive so I pulled the Permanent Link out explicitly. I also added a link to the category archive the post is from, so if a particular post piques your interest it's easy to get to similar posts. Finally I added a link to the official Disclaimer for the site.

I've been keeping a list of changes I've made and changes I plan to make using OmniOutliner. Jeff has been telling me about the wonderfulness that is OmniOutliner for quite some time, but I had never really used it. But now I have finally seen how great this app is and have been using it for quite a few various lists lately. And now Ricci points out to me that you can make different column types like pop up lists, dates, durations, and the standard checkboxes. Cool!