Northerners are generally accustomed to weathering frigid winters and all sorts of nasty frozen precipitation (I moved South to escape all that, or so I thought). When consecutive days of winter storm warnings hit central Texas, however, everything pretty much comes to a grinding halt. Thankfully my electricity didn’t go out during this time; the only casualties I have to report are a pair of trees that succumbed to ice buildup and pretty much broke in half.

Anyway, since we had to endure several days of freezing rain, snow, and ice, I decided to take advantage of being trapped inside and have finished doing the modifications I had in mind for the site (which I warned about previously).

What’s new, you ask?

· There’s now a handy sitemap page (XML included), and another for archives. These facilitate navigation and remove unwanted sidebar clutter.

· Social bookmarking capabilities have been added to individual posts. If you see a post you like, please don’t hesitate to pass it along.

· More efficient comment quicktags have been added for easier text formatting.

· The live preview feature for commenting has returned, so you can see what your contributions look like in advance, underneath the comment form.

· Post categories have been restructured.

· Navigation through search results and archives has been made much easier.

· I’ve also made numerous visual enhancements to the layout here. Some you’ll surely notice, but the minor formatting adjustments are pretty subtle (things I had to fix that were bothering me). If you navigate through the menu up top, you’ll see some of the more obvious changes.

· The site is more accessible now for users with disabilities; my goal is to have the site WAI/WCAG 1.0 compliant eventually (on at least Level A if not Double-A) and it’s most of the way there, but I need to double-check a few things before proclaiming that’s finished.

While I checked all these tweaks in Firefox and Internet explorer, I can’t guarantee everything displays precisely as intended (browsers that stubbornly deviate from W3C standards *cough, IE* make achieving uniformity a bit of a pain). If you’d like to offer praise or criticism, please feel free — and, do add a comment below if you come across a feature that isn’t working properly. Just let me know what you’re using to view the site so I can squash any gremlins.

Hope you enjoy.