rblog

Our old website is officially retired. Before we say hello to the new website, a brief reflection on the old website. I can't remember when I created version 1.0, but it was no later than 1998, it was a pretty manual process to write and publish articles, as it was all done manually in html. Version 2.0 was created in 2001, very much along the line of today's weblogs - an "easy" way to publish articles that might be of interest to people, along with some movies and genealogy charts. It was actually pretty cool (to me, as I am the only reader). The idea was to store all the information as a big block of XML and each of the different sections would use XSLT to filter/render it differently, so that recent articles would be on the front page and archives would be elsewhere. However, although much easier to use than 1.0, it was still a bit of a pain. I had to write the new article in XML, run some XSLT macros, and then upload via FTP to my comcast account. That part wasn't fun.

In 2003, I finally got serious about writing down the silly things that kids say - and for this I needed something far easier than my existing system (which was also tied to one machine). So, I got MovableType setup on one of our servers and started publishing to rblog.landisfamily.org. Obviously, MovableType was much better and easier to use than my home-built system. But I never officially switched over www.landisfamily.org to the MovableType weblog.

Until now. With the death of the Windows machine that was hosting our server, I have switched over to to Linux. This required a reinstall of MovableType and a restoration of the blog (fortunately, I had a backup). And once I found this strong lavendar color theme that matches Emily's room, it was time to make the big switch.

So, welcome to the new blog. I hope to start using more photos in stories and eventually to have Molly and the kids learn to publish their own articles.