I have re-activated the guestbook, hoping that Wordpress will protect it against spam. Just to keep a bit of history, I copied (manually!) all the entries from the old guestbook, it’s a good thing that not too many people visit this site!

The new guestbook is nothing but a specialized Wordpress page, as described in this useful blog post.

Now go ahead and sign! 

This is the time of the year I should renew my subscription to the service provider that hosts this site. And every year, I promptly avoid doing it until it’s too late. There seems to be a strange fascination in watching the daily emails reminding me that the domain is about to expire, and ignore them.

So if you have tried to access the site or send me email, and failed, now you know why.

This update has been sitting half-baked in my computer since last autumn, and finally I decided it was time to release it.

The biggest visible change is the new theme with black background, meant to enhance the color of the photos which are after all the main content of the site. Also, I decided to jump on the bandwagon and move to Flickr as the location for all my shared photos, mostly because it’s just the simplest way. The “moblog” is demoted to a mere post category, and finally I removed the guestbook because it had become a magnet for spam.

Under the hood, Balenet is now powered by Wordpress 2.5, which seems to be the mainstream in terms of free weblog softwares. It was very easy to set up and import all the old posts, although I found the theme mechanism a little hard to master. I haven’t followed the evolution of Movable Type lately, but all in all I prefer Wordpress so far. 

For the editing I moved to Coda, a clever web editor for Mac OS X that helped me to (finally) learn CSS.

Hope you like it. I’m leaving the comments enabled for a while, at least until the spam starts to pick up.