New article section format.
I’ve had a “Useful Articles” section on the website for a couple of years, driven by some programming that I wrote myself. The problem is, I threw it together really quickly, simply to get something going, but without any real forethought into how it would be updated, added to, or anything else.
The problem is, while it worked ok from the point of view of a site visitor, it was difficult and incredibly ugly to add or update articles for the site maintainer. This led to me being quite lax with updates, and I stopped updating completely after several months, even though I’ve written plenty of stuff in the meantime.
Rather than rewrite, reinvent, or spend the time to write a complete administration interface, I decided to save myself the time, and use some freely available blogging software, which would give me a much simpler interface to add articles, and also add the ability for people to comment, add ideas that I never thought of, or even tell me I’m flat out wrong. (Of course, I’ll probably delete any post that says that. 
) None of this was possible with the old section.
It also gives me the option of easily adding more categories, shuffling articles from one category to another, and organizing things very nicely. This was all possible with my previous programming, but again, maintaining it was ugly. That’s what I get for throwing something together quickly, and never getting around to neatening it up.
I can also now add files to an article, so if I write a how-to for something that needs a software utility, it can be added to the article in question.
I’ll be importing all the articles from the old section over the next few days, then happily planting a few sticks of virtual dynamite under that part of the website.