Over a year ago I wrote this:

Did you notice? I haven’t posted anything in a couple weeks. That’s because this blog is going on a temporary hiatus. Very temporary. I’ll certainly be back. And when I return, I’ll be blogging with more focus. As much as I enjoy blogging about whatever strikes my fancy, I decided that this thing is in serious need of some fine tuning. I’m going to narrow things down.

Well, I did. Sort of. But the word “temporary” was apparently grabbed off the street, hustled into that blog post and forced, at gun point, to stand in for the words “absurdly long.” I’ve been blogging in earnest since about November, and I even attempted a vague remodel of the site. But that remodel really only consisted of buying a couple throw pillows and arranging them over the old site. I was never happy with it. The red letters emblazoned across the top reading, “Under Construction,” became simply part of the decor. I wanted something more complex, more functional, more representative of me. I am, after all, rather complex and functional and, if this blog is to believed, well-represented by torn bits of paper.

So here it is. I hope it pleases the eye. There are a few features and issues you might need to know about. If you’re interested, read on after the jump.

Music Player change. I’m ditching PodPress. I liked the little embeddable players, but there was a lot of under-the-hood messiness that drove me a little crazy. I’m trying out the Yahoo music player instead. It’s easy to use. Click the little play button beside the song title in question and away you go. And when that song is done, it automatically moves on to the next track in the queue, which the player generates from all the mp3’s present on the page. Very nice. You can see the little tab down low on the left. Go ahead and hover. And press PLAY. I’ll miss the random access capabilities of the PodPress player, and that you could pop it out of the site to play a sing was a great bonus. But I love the playlist feature and the volume control of the Yahoo player. It’s also much easier to post a tune.

Twitter Feed. Sixsquare now has its own feed over at Twitter. Post titles are automatically sent out as updates, with a link back to the post in question. And I’ll be augmenting the feed with extra music and movie stuff and the occasional witty movie quote. Follow the feed here. And if you care to, hop on to my personal feed as well. I’ll prettify the Sixsquare Feed later. For now, enjoy the color light blue.

Music Downloads. The PodPress machinery made it possible to prevent downloads of the audio files. That was helpful in keeping bandwidth down. The new system allows direct download of the mp3 file in question, so I’ll have to keep an eye on the little red meter over at Dreamhost. But I’ve set up some pretty strict anti-hotlinking barricades, so if I can keep those leeches at bay, I should be fine. Incidentally, same goes for all the MySpace image thieves…

Works. On the right is the jump station for the screenplays. Go ahead and click away, but there’s nothing really there now. Eventually I’ll restore the access to the stuff I’ve written.

Category Icons. Above each of the posts is a little icon. Sometimes a few. Those will link you back to the category pages for each of the items.

Site Headers. There are forty of them now. Eventually there will be a hundred. All of the images were either taken by or taken of me. Refresh for an all-new image. What fun!

More on the way… I have plans to include informative pages about music and writing and general site information in the future. Right now there’s just a picture of me in the sidebar. Wearing a hat.

Known Issues.

1. I hate IE. With a passion. If Internet Explorer were quietly removed from every computer on earth I wouldn’t even notice. But I’ve managed to pull IE into shape on all parts of the site except the recent music posts column in the sidebar. For IE users the rollovers are pretty screwy. I’m working on it.
2. Also, for some reason, images on the page pull blanks on search results pages. Sometimes. I’ll have to work on that as well.
3. The Archives and the Category Lists are in the footer. I’m trying it out there, but I don’t think I’m going to love it. More than likely, they’ll be pushed to their own page.
4. Thanks to some .htaccess trickery the permalinks have changed yet again. They’re cleaner and more beautiful than ever, and in fact, the server is configured to automatically correct incoming links to older permalinks. But the really old links are all screwed up. Through the same process I should be able to do the same thing with those. Lotsa broken links for now. They’ll go away.
5. Most older mp3s are gone. I could recreate the stores of music, but the process would be nothing short of painstaking. I’ll probably leave them alone.
6. Finally, there are a hundred other little bits of style that need to be smoothed, grooved and improved. But the worst of the work is done.

That’s enough. I’m going to bed. I’ll post something real tomorrow.