Running on BlogSphere template

As of today my blog is using the BlogSphere template. As far as I know, this is the first blog using the BlogSphere template from an R5 server. Declan had been wrangling with a bit of an odd error with comments in R5, but all now appears to be fine. I'll leave it to Dec to post the details of the fix -- minor differences between R5 and ND6.

I've converted the main posts from my earlier blog (I'd been running from a design I'd modified from Anthony Connell's wonderful FreeDom Blog template). The comments I hope to convert during this next week, but no guarantees.

Other items on my list for site maintenance include:

  1. Adding redirects so links to old postings will still work with the new blog design
  2. Incorporate the CSS buttons described in Mike Golding's article on notestips
  3. Enable RSS links for summaries and for full articles. In an effort to get this up in short order, I've currently got the old RSS address working on this new design, but now sending XML for the full article. There are differing opinions as to whether one should publish an RSS feed of just the summaries, or the full articles, or everything including comments. I tend to side with those who suggest providing RSS feeds for all of the options, and let the reader decide which if any they care to use. But not today.
  4. Activate the Calendar navigator. The BlogSphere template makes this extremely easy to do, but I don't like how Internet Explorer 6 renders the font, so I'm going to play with it a little first.

In fact, there's a fair amount that IE does not render very well. The more standards-based browsers like Mozilla, Firebird, Opera, etc., seem to render things quite nicely. Ahh, the world of cross-browser support :-)

Update: Took a break for dinner, a glass of wine, and a walk with my wife. Then got back to this site and made a couple of tweaks to allow the old site's links to work, so if anyone had bookmarks to articles from the site's FreeDomBlog format, those links should now work again.