Site News

I've pulled together all of my fatherhood posts from the time Jordan was born until now, and grouped them into a category called, simply enough "Geek Dad". These posts have proven popular over the years, and they've been languishing in obscurity since the redesign. Now they're back and easy to find -- just go to the "Blog" section and look for the "Blog Categories" list in the right-hand column.

Yeah, it had to happen eventually. I've created a MySpace account, partly as another way of promoting Nuketown and Radio Active, partly to play with something new, and partly so I know what the hell I'm talking about when I'm asked about it (or pontificating on my ol'soapbox).

MySpace has given rise to some of the most butt-ugly pages the Web has seen since those ancient days of 1997 when the infamous marque and blink tags still roamed the Internet. It's not a place I intend to spend a huge amount of time hanging out on, what with Nuketown needing to be fed and cared for, but it will be yet another outpost of the ol'thermonuclear burg (like The Atomic Age and might just land the site a few new readers.

After six months of hard work, a year's worth of speculation, and a decade's time spent on the Web, the new Nuketown is online. The redesigned site features a new look that evokes earlier iterations of the ol'thermonuclear burg, while updating it with a slightly glossier feel. New features abound on the site, which is powered by the open source content management system Drupal. These features include:

As I mentioned in Radio Active #31, this month I will be transitioning Nuketown from its current configuration to a new, Drupal-based content management system and a shiny new layout. To avoid having to maintain two sites while I migrate the database from one to the other, I will not be making any updates to Nuketown for the next week to two weeks.

All will not be quiet however. If you want to track the progress of the migration, please read my Atomic Age blog over on Blogger, which will be updated almost daily. Look there for announcements about the second round of beta tests, screen shots of the latest versions, and quasi-technical rundowns of problems remaining and solved. Comments and feedback via the blog or Nuketown's own feedback form are welcome and appreciated!

The Nuketown redesign picked up pace this weekend as I finally sat down and focused on it for a couple of hours. In the process I wrestled the new site's visual design into place, ending up with a fusion of the current blog-like look and the experimental magazine-still site I was playing around with. If you're curious, you can check out a JPEG of the current beta.

The new site echoes certain thematic elements from previous versions -- the atom logo by GreenTentacles is still there, and the color scheme -- white, grey, red, black -- reinforces it while at the same time evoking some of the earlier designs.

If you're wondering why Nuketown's been pretty quiet for the last few weeks, it's because I've been continuing to work on the beta. I've got a design that I like -- it needs some tweaking, but it accomplishes my goal of changing up the site enough to be different while retaining enough for it to be familiar.

I'm playing around with some variant home pages for Nuketown, and I've come up with one I really like: it uses a large photo/image/graphic on the home page, and places the content beneath it. It feels more webzine-ish, and less bloggish, while retaining interactivity (or rather adding it, since there isn't much here now).

I made some minor repairs and upgrades to The Atomic Age the other night -- I cleaned up the blog roll, killing out a few of the bad links, adding in some fresh ones, and I finally got my Technorati profile working on both this blog and Nuketown, which allowed me to add a link to my profile.