Here’s a brief rundown on what’s new here – it’s not just the pretty colors.

First, the “dumbass folly” “noble experiment” of using phpbb forum software for my blog has been officially terminated – as you can see, I’m now running WordPress like everybody else. The upside is that now commenting is much easier, and you don’t need to register to comment.

I’ve spent some time going through all the old posts, adding tags and categories. Hopefully I’ve been able to do so somewhat consistently, to make searching easier. All my personal topics have been merged into this blog stream.

The support forums have been upgraded to phpbb version 3 (for a few days, I considered using bbpress but it wasn’t enough for my needs). There, too, users will be able to comment without registering. There’s a huge list of registered users brought over from the old forums; I’ve rejected quite a few obvious spammers, and users registered over the last 14 days may have been lost. Also, I think that some user’s passwords may not have survived the migration process. However, as I said, it’s no longer so important to be registered at all.

In exchange for allowing free posting to anonymous users, all comments and posts on both blog and forums will be held in a moderation queue; the spammers have already been at it, but “none shall pass”.

Links to older posts should be automatically forwarded to the appropriate WordPress permalink or to the new support forums, depending on the topic. The RSS feed URLs have also changed; some readers should switch you over automatically, but be sure to check.

As you may have noticed, I’ve integrated the product pages and other static material to use the blog’s theme. I haven’t quite figured out a fully theme-independent way of doing so, since I could find no theme that both supports that and looks “just so”; expect the current theme to stay in place for quite some time (maybe not 7 years like the last one, though 🙂 ).