Home of Heath Allyn
Actor/Musician Extraordinaire!

Updated my Bio page to reflect my current location on the highway of life.

*Cue everyone screaming as their brain is taken over with Tom Cochran’s “Life is a highway, I wanna ride it all night long.”*

There has long been heated debates as to whether a website should specify whether or not links open in new windows or not. One side says they do not like having that choice forced upon them, while there’s also many web newbies who don’t know about the various methods to get a link to open in a new window and therefore might get lost and confused if they click a link and are suddenly taken away from the site they were looking at to some other site.

That of course is a gross oversimplification of the matter, but suffice to say, I have removed all “target” attributes from all my links. This means that none of my links will open in new windows unless you take some action to make it so. The links are free from oppression! Enjoy the brave new world of choice!

I personally use Mozilla Firefox and ctrl-click or click the middle mouse button if I want a link to open in a new window. Even better is that the Tabbed Browser Extensions plugin for Firefox has many settings allowing you to control the opening of new windows. I love the setting that automatically opens links that refer to external sites (sites other than the one I’m browsing) in a new window, or a new background window.

I have switched my home page (and for the moment, only home page) from Movable Type to Wordpress. Consider it an experiment. I’m thinking of switching my “Human” page but wanted to wait until I had fully experimented enough to make sure I would be happy with the switch. This page is a bit simpler and less active than my Human page so it made a fit test subject.

So far, I’m quite happy. I foresee Movable Type quite possibly being totally abandoned by me for Wordpress in the near future, but we shall see after a much more in depth and extended usage test. Why? Well, Wordpress has many things going for it:

• It’s free and open source, yet still quite robust, with great features plus many more available via plugins
• I’ve read that the community is really great. Bugs are addressed in a timely manner and since it’s open source, anyone who knows what they’re doing can help improve it and write great plugins for it.
• It uses php to generate web pages on the fly. No static pages just taking up your web space. It also generates in strict compliance with web standards! Wooot!
• Once I got past the initial learning curve of staring at some php and going “duhhhhhhh” I found it actually much easier to setup, maintain, customize, hack, and manipulate than MT. Surprisingly simple and lean. When I though of a feature I wanted but it didn’t have, I quickly and easily found a plugin, installed it and had it working in the blink of an eye. I easily uninstalled and reinstalled several times. It was only a matter of minutes before I was completely back up and running again. The one or two times I had to start Movable Type from scratch were a huge pain, and I try to avoid it at all costs.

All in all, I’m extremely impressed so far, but just want to take some time and make absolutely sure before I do a total switch.