Much as I did last time, I used the time I allotted for this entry to reorganize the site, fixing a number of bad design decisions I made at the beginning. For instance, the footer is now centered more attractively. The most significant change (at least for me) is that I've taken all the archives and sorted them into yearly folders; rather than jamming them all into the root directory. If I've done it right, it should have no effect on your viewing of the site. It merely makes things more logical and easier to work with for me.

The process was more complex than it may seem. I couldn't just move the old pages; I not only had to edit their internal code so that they kept pointing to the other pages and images properly, but I also had to set up redirect pages so that search engines and visitors would still find their previous links to be valid. Rather than create 90 redirect pages by hand, I used a spreadsheet and batch file to generate them. (I would have preferred to program it but my machine is not presently set up to do so.) The columns of the spreadsheet served as a sort of poor-man's loop, allowing me to quickly copy code around a central column of file names. (One would normally program a template line and read the file names in from a data list.) This code simply constructed a DOS batch file which used echo commands to create each file and dump a dummy webpage with a redirect meta tag into it.

And now the site's root directory is still badly cluttered with redirect files... Ah well. I can take them down in a few months, once the other links have a chance to circulate.

That's it for now. Until!