Clean up time!

OK, anybody who dropped in during the weekend probably got an eyefull as thy watched me restructure this site from the ground up. Heh. As you may (or may not) have noticed I updated my page a little. The site just got massively UGLY recently. Like awkward adolescence the site was gangling between two phases of life. It was a noodle soup of mixing color schemes, half HTML, half CSS/XML, frames that RSS inspired visitors couldn’t see, etc. Plus those big honking store banners annoyed me- and I made them! This is a little better. When I switched to Wordpress earlier this year this is more the kind of site I had in mind. Lots of cool things you can do with WP. So what’s new?

• Random page headers. Now everytime you come back you have the chance of seeing a new header. I have just 4 now and two of them aren’t going to last very long, but more will be coming. I plan on mixing in some stills of environments from my short film as well as some Myopia vistas. What can I say? I like stuff to look nice.
• I got rid of the frames around the blog. My stats were telling me that more and more people were coming to this site through feedreaders and RSS links. Which is cool, but when you click on a post in a feeder you don’t see all those other HTML frames around the blog page. So now everything is in the blog/site itself. No lost and wandering images or words. They’re all safe and warm here.
• Got me a nice fading slideshow of various images of characters and stuff I’ve made over the years. I’ll be adding to that show as time goes by with sketches, maybe some stills from my past work projects and other fun stuff.
• The links to my tutorials, animation clips, short films & contact were all out in frames before. I thought I should bring them in out of the rain. The launch pages are all handy Wordpress pages now.
• Of course a (more tasteful) link to the kLango Online Store for those who want to get their VTS groove on. The FAQ buttons for the VTS as well as the Animation: Personal Trainer program are now in WP world.
• A countdown meter so folks will know when the next VTS is due. I get about 25-30 emails a month from subscribers wondering when the VTS is coming out. Heh. Of course I tell everybody in an email the first week of the month, but email is sooooo 1996 and nobody really reads it anymore. So if you wanna know when to expect the next VTS, just come here and have a look.
• I figured since I have so many different translations of my tutorials, why not make it so you can translate any blog page on my site? But if you speak some obscure language like Welsh or Tibetan chant, well, first- you’re really cool and I wish I could take you to parties. And second, you’re on your own when it comes to figuring this thing out.
• The archives are now all searchable and the post categories are in a drop down list. This is mainly a screen real estate solution.
• Ditto for the links. My blog roll and link list was HUGE! I am blessed to know so many cool folks, that’s all. Anyhow, those links are all still there. Just click to expand the list you’re interested in.
• Of course a unified color and design theme that doesn’t immediately induce convulsions when looked at.

I still have stuff I want/need to do. I need to make each of the movie files pop up in a sized window with a player. I have a Wordpress plug in to do this, but it’s just going to take some time to get it working and I’m out of time for this round of improvements. Doing the same with the tutorials should be pretty easy as well. Then I want to get something set up for an asides (side bar mini-blog) where I can toss up some of my little stories about living here in Brazil without cluttering up the space for the animation stuff. Anyhow, I hope you kids like the new digs. The site was a mess and it was bugging me for months. I’m finally able to sleep a little better now that it’s been cleaned up some.