First of all, I?d like to apologize for the lack of updates, but I?ve been busy with school starting this week ? hard to believe that I?m a senior already, that next year I?ll be in college. As you may well know, the days leading up to school can be hectic and the first week can be exhausting. I?m doing much better now and I?ll make every effort to maintain a fairly steady posting schedule.

I have, however, been making some changes to the site. I?ve added a lot of JavaScript, such as the now collapsible menu bar on the left side of the page and the comment form which remains hidden until you?re ready to make that all important comment. My hope is that this will simplify the page layout and make the site easier to navigate. Load times should not be impacted, negatively or positively, by these changes.

With that in mind, I?ve also eliminated the blogroll links from all pages except the homepage, greatly decreasing load times across the site. Some other cleanup/optimization to my template should also decrease the loading time slightly, especially on slower connections.

I?ll be back with actual content updates soon, but I thought I?d just give the world a little update on the blog and myself to tide everyone over.