Refurbishing this site

Okay–anyone who’s bothered to read through the all the entries here at Farlops Industries has probably noticed several nagging doubts that have been gnawing at me for the last few years.

• Greymatter’s progress has fallen far behind most of the major blog scripts out there. My code has forked very far from the latest incarnation and there is functionality that I want that is likely not to be included in future versions of GM.
• My current layout, though highly futuristic in 1999, is rather alienating for reading long blocks of text. I want to provide a new default and more alternatives.
• My career as a freelance webmaster has grown to a point were I need to make my personal site more obvious and business oriented. New customers should arrive at my site and not be confused by my whimsical evasion.
• Over the years, I’ve written some good rants in various places on the Web. I wrote these under a pseudonym, Mr. Farlops. I think it’s time for my real name to take off the mask and own those opinions.

To that end, refurbishing steps are in the following order:

1. Changing some content on older pages to make them clearer and to use my real nameThis has been done. I’ve revised my contact page and my biographical pages and added my resume.
2. Changing my main site navigation link text so their destinations are more obviousThis has been done for my GM pages. I have to do it now for the old static pages.
3. All old files, hopefully, should remain in their same locations. Not many people link to me but, I don’t want to break the few links there are.
4. Defaulting to a new layout and typography which is hopefully easier to read. I plan to offer the old layout for nostalgia’s sake plus other layouts to play with.
5. Installing the latest version of Movable Type. Word Press does have some attractive features but my host doesn’t have the PHP interpreter or MySQL installed. I’ve learned how to fix MT‘s URLs. And I plan to leave all my old GM entries in that tool and in the same place to avoid breaking links for other people. My first post in MT will be under my real name.
6. I will have to change the navigation in my old GM pages to seemlessly fuse with my new navigation. Ideally, aside from the URL, people shouldn’t notice any difference.
7. I may roll back to the strict fomulation of HTML 4.01 since my host won’t let me serve XHTML as XML. I have to talk to The Fish about this. For now, I’ll stick with strict XHTML 1 served as HTML because this is allowable, if frowned upon.I’ve decided to stay in XHTML 1 strict.

I plan to revise this entry as this process progresses. This should be my last entry in GM.