So, if you’re reading this on anything other than the rss feed, you’ve noticed the new site design. I explained a bit of it in another post, but to run through it again but I’ll go into a bit more detail here.

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I’m about to go live with the overhaul of the site, but I need to test this so that Blog posts don’t end up on the FRONT page, but only on the Blog page. Hopefully it’ll work! If you’re reading this on the old blue site, the hack has been in place for years. I’m hacking the NEW template and I need to test it.

Late last night I installed a new module that will check for an iphone and load up an iphone friendly news page. Right now it’s fairly limited, mostly because I had to then install a script on the front page that checks for an iphone and sends you over to the new format. The problem with this is there’s is now no way for iphone users to view the full site. I’ll likely just mess with this a bit and turn it off until the developer makes a switch so that you can flip back over to the full site. For now though, I’m going to leave it on. If you’re reading this site with an iphone, feel free to comment on this blog post and give me feedback.

Tonight I made more tweaks to the site, and enabled the new Reviews and the new Tips sections. They’re not really NEW, but they’re links to the searchable news engine for any tag that is marked Reviews or Tips. Eventually I’ll get fancy headers for those sections instead of just the text, but for now it’ll be the text.

Also, because of the way the OLD site is made, every old page has a header on it. Instead of going through and editing every header, I simply added links to the new page from each Old main section, so if you land on an old section, you can easily get to the new section. Eventually ALL the sections will be WordPress pages except the front page of the site, so it will all be searchable and dynamic.

Yes folks, it’s me, the long lost creator of this site. I haven’t bloged in a LONG time, but I’m finally back in the swing of things on the site. Besides a few news stories here and there (which Ken has mostly been taking care of) the site really hasn’t been updated. Today I upgraded the news engine to WordPress 2.6 and fixed some glitches in the look of the news pages. I also fixed the blog link so that it now simply links to a category listing (yeah!).

You’ll see other new things over the next month or so. I want to add a wordpress downloads page, so that the downloads are tracked. Right now that portion of the site is simply a hacked together HTML page. I also plan on dumping the old reviews into the wordpress system (and maybe removing the really old ones) and making that a category listing also.

I had originally planned to move the site to Joomla, and I may still do that, but for now, it’s staying as a WordPress/HTML site. Eventually I’ll update the front page to a more modern look and get some of the side bar boxes automated with wordpress widgets (If I can get that working).

The last new item will really keep the site fresh. I joined the PRMac site and installed their news plugin into our site. That means I get press releases automatically, and they go into the drafts folder of the site. Now I can simply double check one, add an image to it and post it. That means you’ll finally see decent news at decent intervals on the site.

Thanks for sticking with us through all the dead times, we hope to not repeat that again!

Well, here I am again, posting after not posting for months. My blog has always been something I’ve mean to do more often (say, once a week or so) and then just never get around to. Anyway, on to the topic…

This year has been a whirlwind, boot in good and bad ways. The early part of the year saw a great boost in sales with the release of PowerBlue, and my Mac consulting business was doing great. We did so well that I decided to replace my badly aging machines (My main production machine was a Dual 867) with some new hardware. I’m now the proud owner of a 17″ MacBook Pro and an 8 core Mac Pro tower. That’s the good news.

The bad news is consulting dropped way off, and I manage to get any other themes out this year except Galleria, which is more geared toward showing off photos and less of a general business theme. So, I’ve been really busy retooling PowerBlue for Keynote 08 (and adding iPod and HD sizes to it) and doing lots of Joomla based web development. This is going to be a good thing in the long run, but it’s pulled me in so many directions that my head is swimming most days (You try doing on site mac consulting, AND Keynote theme creation AND web development all in one day!). Anyway, the PowerBlue 08 layouts are now complete (short of a few look through’s for mistakes) and all I have to do now is update the extras, build the installer and update the web page.

The PowerBlue upgrade should be reasonably prices (around $10 I think) and the whole package still won’t cost much more than Frames does now (there’s another theme that’s due for an overhaul in 08).

The other bad news is that I won’t make it to Macworld yet again. At this point I’m not sure if Ken will make it, but he usually finds a way to get out there.

Anyway, I’d like to thank all of you who bought themes from the site over the years, you’ve kept me going when things get tight, and you’ll keep me going on into the future. Thanks!