After realizing just how many links to Amazon I had on the site, I decided to join their referral program. So if anyone clicks on a DVD, CD, or Book I have listed, and eventually purchases it from Amazon, I receive a small referral fee. The same is true if you click the Amazon.com banner at the bottom of the page and end up purchasing something.
I don’t expect much to come of this, but maybe after a few years I’ll get a $5 gift certificate or something.
After many complaints from various sources about not updating the site, I’ve finally gotten started on the arduous task of catching up on 9 months worth of family happenings. I even heard from one person that they were “sick of that darned telescope” that was at the top of the page for so long. 
One thing that has taken me so long is that I’ve been trying to develop a “theme” for WordPress that matches the look of my old site. I wish I’d started on something easier, because I’ve hit dead-end after dead-end and wasted considerable time trying to figure out advanced style-sheet stuff without even fully understanding the basics. Now I’ve decided to put that off for a while and just start entering some articles and updating the gallery. There are lots of ready-made themes available, and I’ll just use one of those until I get mine working.
People told me that my website looked like a blog, even before I knew what a blog was, and it may have, but now that I’m using some real blogging software, lots of neat stuff becomes available. For example, I am able to group articles into categories, so if you want to see every article pertaining to “Home Theater”, you just choose that category from the sidebar. You can also leave comments or questions about a particular article instead of having to use my old goofy “Contacts” page, or the guestbook. You can also select dates for old archived articles, and there’s now a nicer “Search” facility.
I wish I had been using some kind of blogging software for the last couple of years. In order to take full advantage of these cool features, I want to get all my old articles into WordPress. If I had been using any of several pieces of blogging software instead of my own made-up format, I’d now be able to automatically import the articles. Unfortunately, as it is now, this is mostly by hand, with lots of copying and pasting, and manually back-dating things so they’ll be in the correct order. I hope it’ll be worth it.
So anyway, let me know what you think. It’s real easy to leave comments, and after I “approve” your first one, the rest will appear as soon as you leave them.
After I made all these recent updates, I realized I had never added Thanksgiving or Christmas photos to the gallery. I have done so now, but lots of them are without captions so far.
After over a year of stagnation, Holly has finally updated HollysNotebook.com. Andrew has also done some work on AcesBase.com recently. Check ’em out.
Due to some possibly valid complaints, the entire site’s color scheme has been brightened up a bit. I hope everyone likes it, especially the complainers. I also fixed 4 grammar problems on the Boomerang page. I hope they didn’t bug anybody too badly. Keep those suggestions and complaints coming!
I have added a new page: The Advice Page. There you will find the wisdom of the ages relating to all things technical (or at least the geeky stuff I’m interested in).
I have also altered the Bighead Voting Page to include the results there instead of posting them here whenever I tally them.
Minor updates to the Boomerang page. I was loaned The Tauhert Collection and I am gradually scanning them in. Now you can see the boomerang Andrew Tauhert set his records with.
Fixed the Links page so external sites come up in their own window instead of inside my frames.
Added a cool black-and-white photo as a place holder for Michelle’s personal page off of the Family page.
To the Friends section of the Photos page, I added some snapshots from “Monkey Show 96”, and a self-portrait from the Tahoe ski trip.
Added a few pieces of art to the Graphics page, including my most recent work, Sleepover,and to the Doctored Photos page, some work that’s not even mine. And can’t believe my luck in finding a rare piece by that noted computer graphics genius, Chris Crosby.
This gave me the idea of creating the email address submissions@brucearmstrong.net so people can send in anything they’d like to see appear here.
Well… I guess technically its Wednesday, and this is a pretty big change so I’m putting it up here by itself. What’s the big change? If you’ve been here before, you’ve probably already noticed the difference. After some constructive criticism, I got rid of the banner across the top of the page and moved the logos around a bit. The top banner was wasting a bit of space. When I finally viewed the page at 1024×768, I saw that things were a little more cramped than I had intended. Now there is a little more room for content without having to scroll around the page so much.
So… This is the new layout. If you want to compare to the old layout, you can click here to see the old version. Let me know what you think. (I guess I need to test at lower resolutions more often.)
Got some excellent feedback from “Other Andrew” (Mr. Tauhert) today. I have thrown away all my HTML and totally redesigned the site from scratch. Hope you like the new look! I also made the look into a FrontPage “theme”, so whenever I create new pages, they all automatically look like this one.
I also spent some time today working on the links section and customizing the “Contact Us” form. I changed the menu/contents bar on the left again, mainly so I could add a “links” button.
Astute readers will also notice that this “Site News” section didn’t exist before and the dates and news are probably made up.
I’ve started working on the Photos page, so you can see a few photos there now, with tons more to come later. I’ve got a lot of scanning to do. I also added a hit counter to this page, but it seems to get reset every time I make an update. I’ll look into that soon.