I’ve grown tired of the theme on my site.  It’s tedious and bores me.  I’ve been working on some changes (in the background) to set the stage for a new theme.  Many of the changes are transparent right now because they don’t impact this theme.  There are some cool features that are worth a mention, though.

One thing you’ll see in the new theme for this site are short URLs.  You’ve undoubtedly seen the somewhat lengthy addresses used to pull data from this site.  Those URLs contain quite a bit of information, such as the application to load, the function to call, the database index for the information needed, and so on.  That doesn’t help when you try to e-mail them, though, as they tend to get mashed.

For instance, the About me page has a URL that looks like this.

http://www.xenogere.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article& sid=442

Since so many of the pages use predictable URLs, it seems it would be simple to create shorter URLs by mapping all of the functions into rewrite rules for this site.  Well, the rules are complete and have been in production on the server for a little over a week for testing.  So far things look good (not that there weren’t problems — like when I disabled access to all of the pages on the site [oops]).

Using the new rewrite rules, the URL above can be shortened to this.

http://www.xenogere.com/article442.html

Isn’t that cool?  You can use the link and see that it works just like the long address above it.  The difference is the first URL is the complete command for the site to execute while the second one is code telling the server to expand the address into the full command before handing it to the site.

I know, it’s very cool but you want to know when the hell it’s going to be in place?  I’m putting the plan together for a new theme and will be sending it out for bids in the next few weeks.  Yes, I’ve decided to hire someone to do it for me.  Be honest…  Look at the current theme and ask yourself if you really want me designing the next one.

I doubt it.

I don’t know how long it’ll take someone to design, develop and code a theme, but, if I can get the plan completed and sent out for bids, I’ll be that much closer to giving the site a major facelift.

So stay tuned…