After several years of using basically the same design for my site, I have decided that I will completely redesign and reorganize everything. It will most likely take quite some time, but it will be ready sometime during 2007. I’ve been brushing up on my (almost forgotten) Maya skills, and I’m really excited about my new logo. Here’s a sneak preview:

I was initially planning on keeping it under wraps till the whole redesign was ready. However, I have another project that uses the new logo, which will be released as soon as I squash some bugs with Internet Explorer. Stay tuned and please leave your comments!

One thing I really like about WordPress is plugin support. With Pebble I had to write my own plugins, which was entertaining but time consuming. With WordPress I can just tweak existing plugins to do exactly what I want.

I’ve always wanted to keep track of all the movies I watch and books that I read, and now thanks to the AMM plugin I can do in an easy way. Plus, if you actually click and buy something by following my Amazon links, I will get a few cents (not that it has happened yet, you can still be the first!). I modified the plugin a bit by adding support for a status (using the label field), adding half star ratings, and setting up a couple of unused fields to allow for additional links. Finally, I made the date field editable so I can add entries with a date of my choice. I would also like an “end date” field, but that requires a new field in the database table.

I also incorporated into the sidebar my latest del.icio.us bookmarks, just to add some dynamic content to my blog to entertain my readership since I don’t post everyday.

Finally, I am using a heat map plugin to display a category cloud, or a bunch of tags with varying sizes.

P.S. If you’re reading this from the RSS feed you’re missing all of the sidebar fun. Come visit sometime!

Here’s the second part of my blogging history:

• Pebble 2.0M1 (March 2005). This version of Pebble requires a JSP 1.3 and Servlet 2.4 compliant application server. In order to upgrade, I sent a request to my host to move my account to a server with Resin 3.x. The move was done in a couple of days. The old version of Pebble didn’t work with Resin 3, and I didn’t bother to find out why. I started the migration to Pebble 2.0 right away, and the template was much better, now using a CSS layout. I also noticed that the templates had been simplified, although this wasn’t as good as it seemed cause further modification of the layout requires delving into files in the WEB-INF/jsp directory. After working on the template for about five days, it was ready, and I upgraded. Some bugs in the JSTL libraries of my host’s Resin installation prevented it from working right away. The stack trace was so large that the JSP support in my account was disabled. I also found a couple of major bugs in this release of Pebble: Edit and delete posts didn’t work, and the RSS feeds were not working. On the bright side, this version added support for tags, which I have found to be a good fit to my blogging style.
  Since my host practically banned Pebble from my site (although there might still be hope), and based on the bugs I found I started looking for alternatives.
• WordPress 2.0.2 (later March 2005). My host has three supported blogs installed via the Fantastico icon in cpanel: Nucleus, pMachine (Free) and WordPress. My brother has been working with Nucleus and had to modify some source files in order to get the look that he was after. I decided to try out WordPress, and even though I don’t like PHP too much I liked the templates and the great number of plugins available. I created a new template based on the default and moved things around a bit to match my site’s style. The only thing that I’m lacking is the navigation links in my top bar, since I have yet to investigate if it can be incorporated easily into that spot. Overall I’m liking WordPress although I’ve found it a bit slow.

That’s the end to my blogging history. You will notice a trend in my blogging attempts, I usually get as far as setting up the blog and customizing it to the look & feel of my site, but I do not add many entries. I’ll try to post more often from now on. If you are reading, you can encourage my efforts by commenting.

Believe it or not, this blog with very few entries has a history, which I will start to narrate in this post.

• Blogger (August 2002). During Summer 2002, I went with my brother and sister to Orlando for a vacation. To keep our parents updated on out doings, I set up a blog at blogger (before it was owned by Google). It turned out that the only internet connection that we could use during our stay was in a very limited computer at the hotel lobby (we didn’t take a laptop since it was a vacation after all). This computer had some trouble with Blogger’s javascript so we couldn’t post, and had to rely on email for our communication. So much for a live journal of all the fun!
• Movable Type (February 2003). When I started exploring blogging software in 2003 this was the most popular package, so I installed it on my Mac (Mac OS X 10.2) and created my first blog. MT generated static pages with all my posts, archives and such, and since my primary host back then was .Mac, I couldn’t install it there, so I just synchronized my local copy with .Mac using sitecopy. Posting was really time consuming, and things like comments and trackbacks were obviously not supported in a static environment. To get around the commenting issue, I programmed a comment interface based on my PerlDatabase. I didn’t receive many comments, but my Perl skills were certainly enhanced.
• Pebble 1.6b (May 2004). After buying the gbtopia.com domain and setting up a website with my current host (Lunarpages), I selected Pebble as my blogging software. I looked for a host with at least a Web Container since Java is my language of choice. Pebble was the only J2EE based blogger that didn’t use libraries such as Velocity that aren’t supported by my host. It turned out to be fine although some hacks were necessary to achieve the look that I wanted. I also had to rewrite the whole template since back then it used tables for layout and HTML 4, and I was switching to a cleaner CSS and XHTML based site. At first I didn’t like the static XML repository instead of a database, but since it was pretty fast, I didn’t mind much, and the backups were a breeze.

to be continued…

After having this blog for quite some time (it was ready since late 2004), I finally decided to start posting some stuff… enjoy while it lasts!

I got inspired by some friends who recently started their blogs, Yamil and Huibert.