I've been very busy since I've been home. But I am planning to have photos on here, as well as on Facebook, and a blog post in the next day or so.

For some reason my last several posts did not seem to trigger email updates for everyone. This message is partially intended to let you know there are several new items online, including notes from my holiday vacation and GYC.

Additionally, I have added a new category to my blog, "Books and Music." This category simply summarizes the book and music reviews I occasionally post. Of course they are also included in the main blog; this is just a more convenient way to access them. Formerly they were part of the "Cool Stuff" category. At the moment there are only a few reviews, but I intend to add more.

Also in the news: Community websites seem to be the new big thing online (MySpace, etc.). I've joined a number of them, and formerly had links to all of the ones I've joined in my Links section (see Links button in the upper right). However, Xanga and MySpace have become my personal favorites, mainly because those are the ones most of my friends are on. In the interest of simplicity, I've decided to remove the links to the other community sites, although I am still part of them. For the record, I am also on Window Live, Multiply, Friendster, and Ringo. However, of those four, only Multiply shows much promise, and at this time only a very small group of my friends have accounts with any of them. If you are looking to join a community website, I highly recommend Xanga (lots of cool people, lots of neat SDA groups), and then MySpace (many more people, more features ... but uglier in more ways than one).

While I like the program I've used to redesign and maintain this site (RapidWeaver), it is starting to become a bit cumbersome, something I thought might eventually happen from the get-go. RapidWeaver uploads static pages only — no dynamic web apps involved — and consequently at least once a month it is necessary to re-upload the entire collection of blog pages to keep their indexes current. After nearly eight months, this is becoming a little taxing on my dial-up connection (although it still usually takes less than five minutes to complete). Besides the upload burden, it is not possible to maintain the blog from multiple computers, due to the way RapidWeaver works (everything needs to be managed from a single computer). I would really like to break free of that.

At the moment WordPress seems one of the better options. I don't want a remote hosted blogging service (like Blogger), nor do I want a gargantuan content management system (like Drupal). I just want something simple and easy to use, with a pretty GUI, that I can host on my own site, and that is preferably free, open source, standards compliant, and actively developed. There are a few other interesting options besides WordPress, but I've heard so many good things about that one that I'm leaning heavily towards it.

I've decided to try developing my website using the program RapidWeaver. In some ways it feels like a step back, after using Dreamweaver for so long, but I really wanted something that would help me create an attractive and easy-to-update website with no fuss. So far I am fairly happy with the results.

I am eager to see how my website will hold up in RapidWeaver as the pages increases in number and complexity. If nothing else, it is getting me off to a good start.

Welcome to my new blog. This is my first post. Enjoy!