My, I got goosebumps from that title.  Anyone know why?  😉

Side note: I like this new smiley stuff.  Kinda silly while simultaneously arousing an almost inappropriately gratifying sensation… (said only for the compulsory 😉 that such concepts must surely require when written from within the state of Texas.  Bah.).

You’ll be happy to know that I’ve found the new gallery system I’ll use here and am working on implementing it.  It integrates nicely into the new site engine and is feature rich.  It won’t take much time to get it installed and configured, but it will take plenty of time for me to get the photos uploaded and the galleries fully restored.  There are quite a few photos that I need to edit to reduce the PPI (pixels per inch).  Many of the original digital photos I took were uploaded with their original pixel depth intact.  That’s not a good thing.  They need to be reduced to 72 PPI so they’ll load quicker in all browsers.  Their current density can really slow down an older or dial-up system because they’re high-density pics.  I’ll get all of the web-optimized photos uploaded as quickly as possible, but understand that I’ll be checking each of them beforehand so I don’t druggedly upload all of them anyway.

This means that I’m not importing all of the old posts.  Anything related to the gallery or that relies on the gallery pictures is being excluded until I get far enough to enabled them.  OK, I meant anything except for anything related to The Kids since I simply must have them setup already; you know how they are…).

I’m excited about this rebirth.  Melodramatic?  Perhaps.  But this revamp of xenogere / strange behavior / is challenging, entertaining (especially as I read some of my older posts), drudgingly tedious, and very exhilarating.  The new site engine lets me focus more on content and less on administration, it’s much cleaner and easier to use, it provides the functions I need without being bloatware (sometimes via extensibility!), is much easier to template (giving me, the artistically challenged, an easier shot at having a site that’s at least somewhat cool yet personalized), and provides a cleaner interface that doesn’t “smell” of something — which, despite all attempts at forcefully inducing malleability, PostNuke sites still smell like *nuke sites when all you’ve seen is a link :roll:).

Side note: Hee hee.  Another smiley.  😛  Anyone else feeling delirious?

The moral of the story is that I’m working diligently on getting the site fully operational.  I’m excited about blogging again, although I’m still just little ol’ me.  I’m not shooting for membership in the 1337 club :cool:.

I did say to prepare for some significant changes.  I bet you didn’t believe me.

Thankfully I didn’t delete my original Hello, world! post despite it being excruciatingly abhorrent to human eyes in its original form.  I stripped it of all the original formatting before migrating it to this new platform so it would be available without being embarrassing.

Welcome to the official relaunch of xenogere / strange behavior /.  You’ll undoubtedly notice that there have been some very significant changes.  I have finally moved away from PostNuke as the core site engine and implemented WordPress in its place.

This launch is actually a bit premature as I’ve not gotten all of the original content loaded yet.  The gallery is completely offline at present.  The vast majority of my posts are still missing.  None of my web links have been imported.  I have yet to implement a new contact module.    I’m not done tinkering with the theme (look & feel) — and I’m not sure I’ll even stick with this one anyway.  And the list goes on.

Needless to say, I have much work ahead of me.  I’ll continue posting new content while I’m adding all of the old content back in, but expext that import process to take a while.  I’m working diligently on getting a new gallery setup and ready for your viewing pleasure as well as adding all of my links and other content back to the site.

Still, I hope you like this reincarnation of the site.  I think it’ll be better than before… eventually.

All I can ask is that you be patient.

I have recently been evaluating the future of this blog.  Not in the context of will it continue, so rest assured that I'm not going anywhere.  My evaluation has been in regards to the core site engine and whether PostNuke is the platform I want to continue using.

Much to my chagrin, despite my original evaluation of CMS platforms, I have realized that PostNuke simply carries too much overhead for my needs.  It is, in terms most IT professionals will understand, bloatware — a software package with too many features and too much fluff to be of use in this context.

I'm not bashing PostNuke.  So far as CMS packages are concerned, it is one of the better open source products available under the GNU/GPL license arrangement.  It's full-featured, has a very active development team, is supported by a myriad of interested parties busy developing modules, themes, updates, and so on, and is quite simply a robust web site engine.

And therein lies the problem.  For someone like me, a PostNuke installation simply carries far too much baggage.  The vast majority of the modules are disabled because I don't need them, yet the core engine overhead is still intact (those modules are still referenced/checked during normal site operation).

Honestly, what do I need?  I need a blog.  I need a gallery.  I need the ability to store and present web links.  I need comments support.  I need statistical reporting and referrer management.  I need SEF (search engine friendly) URIs.  I need an archive function.    I might consider using a FAQ function, but, following the original FAQ setup for this site, that's not been a function I've used much — and is therefore not a requirement and probably not even a nice-to-have feature.  I need a valid XHTML engine.

Outside of those things, however, I don't need the rest.  Sadly, PostNuke carries far too much overhead baggage to fit my needs.  Although I originally thought I'd use the majority of those features, after more than two years I have realized that it's very unlikely that I'll ever use them.

It is with some level of trepidation that I have now decided to completely revamp xenogere / strange behavior /.

This is no small undertaking as there is no direct migration path from PostNuke to any of the platforms I’m currently evaluating (such as b2evolution and WordPress).  That means I will have a significant amount of manual work.

But I’m neither worried about nor afraid of the work.  My intention is to make the site better, to simplify it, to reduce the overhead and clutter, and to move forward with a tighter set of features which more closely match my requirements — rather than making my requirements fit the features available to me.

I don’t know when all of this will take place, but I suspect it will be soon.  I also suspect it will be somewhat disruptive.  I’ll do my best to minimize that, of course, and will be diligent in getting the changes done quickly.

What does this mean to you?  Many of the current extras on this site will go away, and many of the useful features will change.  The look and feel of the site will also change… for the better.

Stay tuned, poppets, as I strongly suspect these changes will be welcomed as much by you as by me.

“You can’t own a cat.  The best you can do is be partners.”

—  Sir Harry Swanson