I’m going to be disabling and removing all comments from the static pages. Comments on non-post pages are hard to keep track of (both visually and mentally), clutter the content on those pages, and are causing false positives to appear in search engine results.

Instead, I’ve created forums for further discussion at http://forums.xiphux.com. Since I’ve just rolled this out without much testing, let me know if something needs to be fixed or new forums need to be created.

I’m working on cleaning up the website a little. While I liked the theme I had for the past year or so, I found that after looking at it for a while, it ended up looking really cluttered, and it was actually kind of hard to find what you were looking for.

So here’s what I’m doing:

• New theme for a fresh look
• Removed all the redundant page nesting under “Programming” – now it’s just a flat list of projects/code info
• Removed some of the junk from the sidebar
• Added some quick links on the sidebar to the most commonly visited pages – GitPHP, the running GitPHP instance, and the bug tracker
• Renamed links to GitPHP instance and bugtracker to “Source Code” and “Bugtracker” instead of “Source” and “Mantis” – to make it a little clearer what they are

Basically, I’m trying to make things cleaner, and I’m trying to make it a lot easier to get to GitPHP-related stuff on the site. I don’t intend to remove the rest of the content on the site… I am, after all, about more than just GitPHP, it’s just that GitPHP happens to be my most popular project/page.

I’ve considered moving GitPHP to its own site at times… but it would actually just be more upkeep for me to try to maintain two different sites at once, when really, there’s actually not a whole lot of info on GitPHP. I mean, you download, install, configure, and use it… there’s not a lot more to say.

I also considered moving to a project hosting site such as Google Code, but the vast majority of stuff provided by project hosting sites is stuff I don’t need. A place to host my code? I’ve got a subdomain dedicated to it. Browsing my source code? Hurrr… GitPHP. Downloads? I’ve got plenty of web space and bandwidth. It just seems kind of unnecessary.

The old category structure I had was a really messy and nasty carryover back from when I used to maintain my journal and news separately on previous publishing platforms (Movable Type and homegrown), and from before tags existed on wordpress.  Ditched the blanket “News” and “Journal” top-level categories since they were a pointless distinction, making the topic subcategories into the new top-level categories, merging duplicates together (merging news->music and journal->music, etc).  Started using tags now for more specific keywords.