Like the proverbial cobbler who's kids go shoeless, I've been neglecting Nuketown's technological underpinnings for the last few months, focusing more on cool stuff like getting Radio Active out than mucking around with the lingering Cascading Style Sheet errors.

That started to change this weekend, as I began tidying up the site in preparation for moving to a new web host provider (as with all moves, its always nice if the place looks its best before tearing the house off its foundation.

Clean Up

First up, I've made some much needed, long-delayed fixes to the CSS that drives the site; these are changes I've already implemented at work and even on the Griffin's Crier, but never quite got around to doing on the ol'thermonuclear burg. The upshot for you, the reader, is that the site's various pages are now properly centered (something I wanted to do since the site went live with the new design) and those lingering footer issues (where the footer would rise up over the right-hand column) have been fixed. I do have one last bug there to deal with -- the footer still doesn't work and play well with the left-hand navigation, but there are only so many hours I'm willing to dedicate to messing with CSS on my weekend.

Next, I've got the "Links" section back up; it had been down ever since The Great PHP Include Fiasco of June '05 and I've cleaned up a few annoying database errors that were messing with the section archives. Finally, I've removed the "statistics" page from the site; it was a database-intensive site that was more trouble than it was worth. I may bring it back in the future, if I can make it a little less ornery.

Jumping Ship

Now that everything's working properly, I'm going to go ahead and try screwing it up some more by moving the site to a new hosting provider, which should be happening over the next week or so -- I'm in the process of porting over the various databases that drive Nuketown, and I'm testing all the pages to make sure they're working properly. Having said that, moves like this almost always cause a few unexpected errors, so if things go to hell sometime in the next two weeks, that's the reason.

The new host will allow Nuketown to have its own forums for the first time in the burg's 9-year history, which should be very, very cool. I plan to use them to build up Nuketown's online community and to help with the pending redesign of the site (yes my most excellent reader volunteers -- we will be starting the redesign very shortly.

And Finally...

There's the really big news, included here for you true believers who stuck with me through the boring crap above! I've got a new day job -- well, I almost do. After seven years working as a Web specialist at a university in New Jersey -- and spending 2+ hours every day in traffic -- I've accepted a job at a college down the street from my house. I'll be a "web application specialist", and when I say it's down the street, I'm not being figurative; my new job is about 8 blocks from my house, and I'll be walking to work every day. It's a very, very cool job, and you simply can not beat the commute!

This bodes well for Nuketown, since I'll have an extra 10 hours (probably more like 15, given traffic in New Jersey) a week. Of course, some of that will be spent with family and working around the house, but I should be able to eek out a nice chunk of time for the ol'thermonuclear burg.