We’re Back

Hi Folks! The last few days have been busy around here, as we have moved to a new blog system. That involved a lot of data conversion, various kludges and hacks, late nights, caffeine consumption, and a bit of patchwork to get things up and running. It also required a last-minute emergency move to a new web hosting system, as our old web server wasn’t up to the task of running our new blog software.

There’s still more change to come, but the basic setup is complete, and most of the kinks ironed out.

After the jump. more details including a list of some new features.

First, we’ve changed the look of the blog. Gone is the old circa 2003 design, replaced with something we hope you’ll find cleaner and more appealing.

The next major change you’ll notice is that everyone now has his or her own blog. Before, Greg, Harold, Helen, and Howard all had individual blogs, while John, Peg, myself, and others shared the “main” wetmachine blog. This got to be a little confusing for readers, and even to us. I didn’t want to throw posts about the various things that are of interest to me to people who mainly read the blog for John’s posts, for example. Now we all have our own space.

Our new blog software also comes with some neat features:

• There are now three ways you can comment:
  • You can do it the “old fashioned way” by entering a name, email address, and successfully passing a captcha test.
  • You can sign up for a commenting account on wetmachine.
  • You can use your Facebook, Twitter, Google, or other major account to login.
• You should see easier navigation. We now have tags for articles, archives sorted by date, links to related posts, and a search feature that lets you limit your search to a specific blog, or even a category within a blog.
• Email subscriptions should be easier to manage.  You can easily subscribe to multiple wetmachine blogs.

I’m still working on the site, and will be rolling out new features in the future. Let us know if you find anything that’s broken, or anything you simply hate.