I've completed the transition to static rendering for the most part. On the plus side, this should mean much faster response times for readers of the journal (assuming there are any). Unfortunately, not everything fits itself well to this model. The elements that are more volatile are still suffering, and I have to forcibly re-render at regular intervals to make sure that new stories show up and that the calendar/archive remains up-to-date. But I'm still looking at ways to fix those. Things like the lists of books and other web-log links, etc., I have made into SSI links. This was important if only because that represented about 10% (or more) of a given page's content in bytes, and there was no reason to replicate it over the entire archive tree.

I still plan on adding a comments system, as well as restoring the random-nature of the top-of-page quotes and such. But I have other deadlines to process in the immediate-term.