Rhetoric Reborn

Happy New Year!

And with it, the return (after more than 2 years^[1]) of the seriocomic rhetoric - where I get to try and form some semi-coherent sense out of what is tumbling though my brain and lay it out for the world to laugh at...

More and more this last year I have felt I have wanted to comment on a number of things - political, existential, blogging and web related; and haven't really felt that the photoblog presented a proper format to do this.

Additionally, with extra exposure to the WordPress engine that runs this site over the last 12 months on other client projects I have become more aware of new methods of presenting the information that I want, in the manner that I want.

I am (very) far from finished, but wanted to get the majority of the groundwork done before lifting the lid.

Rebuilding

Part of the dilemma was how to split this website up to handle the existing photoblog (which will continue once I get some inspiration) and run the rhetoric blog along side it. There were several different approaches that I could have taken, but the deciding factor was being able to control everything from one WordPress admin area.

This meant more work initially for a (hopefully) smoother ride down the line. The idea was to create one extra category (rhetoric), and then use the taxonomy integrated to v2.3 of WP rather than subcategories as is the case for the photoblog.

Because of the integrated approach, I needed to change the URL structure of the website to remove the dominance of the 'image' permalink. This was a bigger move than it looks due to the long and pretty decent ranking that the site and it's pages have with Google. Changing the permalink structure willy-nilly would have destroyed any juice that I had built-up with the big G. Luckily this was solved with a little plugin magic^[2] that allowed a better URL structure to incorporate the post title/image name.

Going through to fix absolute links to the re-done URL's allowed me to find a LOT of errors that I hadn't noticed in the code that had slipped under the radar. Fixing these errors and my normal anal penchant for fixing things that aren't broken (minor validation and code indentation) meant that I haven't been able to complete the site functionally, let alone visually. I guess the site has always been a work in progress.

Stay tuned for more updates...