I still have one more feature I plan to integrate into the new version of rjray.org, but for now it is clean and purty enough to re-roll-out.

The most significant differences should be pretty much all under the hood; Rael's release-candidate version of blosxom 2.0 was the main goal of the upgrade effort. To this, I have added a host of plug-ins, including a better archive-calendar (low on the right-hand column) and, most importantly, proper Etag and Last-Modified headers. Not only on the web page proper, but also on the RSS feeds.

Which brings up the next change: I have made the default RSS feed a v1.0 feed, and made the older (0.91) feed accessible via a different URL (index.rss91). I hope this improves the overall quality of the syndication at the LiveJournal feed for my journal, rjray_rss.

And lastly, one of the changes I've made is a subtle-but-significant overhaul of how the permanent links are crafted, as well as the location of about 7 of my journal entries. The logic goes a little like this:

First, I had been using a hack in the earlier version of blosxom to make the "permalink" stay the same whether you were reading the story from the main page or from a sub-category. The newer blosxom has a better way to track this, so I'm using that. In addition to that consideration, the XHTML spec disallows the "/" character in an anchor's (that's the <a>) "name" attribute. I use the permalink there as well, for cross-references and in the feeds, etc. So I use a plug-in to translate all the "/" into "_" to keep XHTML validators happy.

But that also exposed a problem in that I name my entries with numbers. That way, I don't have to worry whether the nifty title I just thought of is already the file-name for an entry two months ago. But the 7 or so entries at my top-level ended up with identifiers that were just plain numbers, which also annoyed the XHTML validator. So, I merged them into the "misc" category, for lack of anywhere better to put them.

I am going to assume that all of this sudden change will almost certainly make LiveJournal's syndicator very confused and probably display the last 15 or so stories again. For this, I apologize in advance. I hope that I don't make any more changes on this scale again anytime soon.