New Year... New Site

Earlier I described the first phase of my updates... since then I've incrementally worked on various things, just in time for the new year. The big changes are:

• More navigation improvements, for example the table-of-contents list in the sidebar.
• Friendly URLs for some of the posts, the post archives, and photo albums... this mostly helps search engines, and not humans per se J. This is done via what is called URL rewriting (so nothing new here). Along the lines of helping out search engines, I've also made the title and meta description and keyword tags in the document header reflect the content of each page.
• Cleaned up some of the UI, which should hopefully make the pages an easier read.
• Part of cleaning up the UI was a set of internal changes, to share the layout markup across all pages, and reducing duplication using a custom masterpage framework on top of ASP.NET v1.x (this site is not yet running Whidbey).
• Finally updated my RSS feed handler to generate Last-Modified and ETag content headers, and appropriately indicate nothing has changed if nothing has indeed changed on my blog. Theres no excuse for not having implemented that sooner. It was definitely long overdue.
• The last one is probably the most significant in terms of visual impact. I've now got multiple themes: the original dark one with a few tweaks, plus a spanking new lighter variant of the same. Ever since I first put together this design, some people have commented that they love it, and at the same time, some people have complained that I am the cause of hurting eyes (not quite so literally though). I personally find the original dark one looks great on LCD panels on my laptop or at work, but doesn't seem do all that well on a regular CRT at home. So in order to please folks, theres a new theme, and you now have a choice. You can switch between them via the two buttons on the page toolbar on the top-right. And if you've got cookies enabled, your choice will be used across all pages on the site, and persisted across sessions. Let me know what you think of the two themes. I'd love to hear any feedback.

I am sure there are some other changes, lurking around here and there. Windiff showed a lot of stuff has changed before I checked in the updates. See if you can spot any other changes...