Notice anything different? Yep, after three years of the same old blog, I got the itch to try another redesign, this time taking at least some advantage of the new features offered in Movable Type 4.2, and embarking on the project with a partial understanding of CSS principles. (The book CSS: The Missing Manual

by David Sawyer McFarland was a huge help in this regard. Simple techniques that I’ve struggled with for the better part of a decade have become stupidly clear to me over the last few weeks — and please don’t blame McFarland for the stupid kludges and inefficient hackwork that characterizes my behind-the-scenes work here.)

This page (http://www.deep-focus.com/dfweblog/index.html), which has long been the main index page for Deep-Focus.com, is no longer the hub. It will remain here as a bloggy interface, and if you prefer it by all means keep it bookmarked. But I’ve created a home page (http://www.deep-focus.com) that crams more separate entries into a smaller space and allows a certain degree of categorical organization that may become helpful as the site evolves further. Do check it out. For the first time, I have Movable Type functioning as a kind of database for movie listings — there are many infuriating limitations, but for the first time I should be able to maintain various indexes (all movies from 2008 sorted alphabetically or by letter grade, for instance) more or less automatically, without typing the listing out in HTML every damned time I want it to appear on the page. Movable Type even makes the thumbnails for me.

I know there are still a few glitches — right now letter grades aren’t showing up with individual entries, so I have to figure out where to put those — but this place has always been a work in progress. Whatever you think of it, I hope this is an improvement.