Having fun tonight!

I've spent the past few hours working on my blog template. I hadn't noticed, but the provider of my guestmap service had bit the dust... clicking on my map took you to one of those domain resellers - you know the ones - they cybersquat on every domain that used to work and is now defunct, trying to get you to buy the name back from them.

Anyway, my guestmap provider was gone, and I don't want people to click on dead links on my blog. So, tonight, I found a new guestmap provider, and linked them into my page. I wasn't happy with the artwork they provided for their link, so I used my rotating globe image instead.

I also was getting annoyed with my archive list. There were several reasons for this. First off, the list was getting long. Even after having converted from a weekly archive to a monthly archive, the list was still fairly long. Second, the list was being shown in the format "01/01/2003 - 01/31/2003". It would look so much better just saying "January 2003". And lastly, the archive links were being displayed from oldest link to newest link. From my experience, people are more likely to want to read the more recent posts than the less recent ones, so why should I force them to scroll down to the bottom of the webpage to get to the most recent archives.

And speaking of scrolling to the bottom of the page, it was getting quite annoying that my main blog page was expanding further and further down, as new archives were added.

Tonight, I fixed all my pet peeves at once by:

• changing the date format to "human readable" format


• reversing the display order (now the most recent month is listed first)


• creating a drop-down menu for the archives, so the archive list doesn't affect the blog page length


• creating a link within the menu to bring me back to the main page

Check out the archive menu on the right to see what I mean.