Spring Cleaning

Google recently announced that it was discontinuing blogs published via FTP which is how this blog used to be published.  So, today I scrapped my custom built template I put together several years back and took the plunge to storing all of my content on Google's servers.  The following are the changes:

• Since the posts are stored on Google's cloud instead of my home machine, and I want the same URL to work, I had to change kevin.servebeer.com from a DNS host to a DNS alias that points to Google's servers.
• Since my picture gallery is still stored on my host machine, I had to register another hostname so that my picture gallery is still accessible.  My picture gallery can now be accessed at http://kevingallery.servebeer.com/gallery2.
• Set up a broken link host to point to kevingallery.servebeer.com so that pictures from old posts continue to work.
• Completely new fresh template design courtesy of the new online template designer
• Besides the new obvious colors and look and feel, a few cool new things:
• Date based hierarchical listing of old posts
• "Cloud" labels where the label names are larger for those that are more frequent
• Subscribe widget with several options to subscribe to the blog
• Cooler "What I'm Reading" section taken directly from my Google Reader account.  The items are sorted by most recently updated and include icons and thumbnails related to the item

Since I'm completely on Google's system now instead of using a hand built template on my home server, I hope to continue to add new and cool features that only the non-FTP deployment can provide.

Hopefully this fresh look will also give me more motivation to post more often.  Nowadays, most of my motivation is spread thin between school, work, and our bathroom remodel (details to come later).  I should be done with school this summer though and hope to pick up on a bunch of neglected projects like this website.