New Edition Day

Welcome to the Thirteenth Edition of the URI! Zone. Were my site a drooly twelve-year-old human, it'd be buying lunch boxes and crappy plastic pencil sharpeners that you have to revolve around the pencil yourself, and heading for the sixth grade, However, since the ratio of Web years to people years is on a scale of fruit flies to dogs, I should probably start looking for a place of web-assisted living soon (maybe urizone.old?)

Regular readers will know that I recently switched hosts from Futurepoint to Kattare, which has enabled me to cast off the constraining raincoat of PHP and fully expose my finely-sculpted Java parts to unsuspecting passersby. Among the new features that I've custom-coded over the past couple weeks, you'll find:

News Search: On the sidebar to the right, you can now do a case-insensitive search for exact matches. It doesn't have the power of Google behind it (so +llama -boobies AND ugly babies probably won't return any results), but if you want to find all the posts that mention Chompy, for example, it'll work superbly.

Improved Comments: Kelley has been bitching about this for years because he's a trumpet player, and thus, makes many mistakes. Now you can edit any comments that were originally posted from your computer (matched by IP address). Simply click the "edit" link on the far right of your comment and make those typos vanish! I'm still not requiring any sort of login to post -- hopefully the tradeoff between convenience and spamming will be worth it.

More pictures of Doobie looking sweet:
This is pretty self-explanatory.

Tagged Posts: I can now categorize posts. All posts written since January 2006 have been tagged, and I'll be doing the previous five years as time permits. At the bottom of every post, you can see which tags have been assigned, and click on tag names to see other posts in the same category. Eventually, I'd like to allow you all to tag posts as "Anna's Favourites" or something. And yes, I do realize that I've essentially caught up to where Blogger was in 1956 just before the launch of Sputnik. This is justified by the fact that homegrown makes it all better -- like an illegal marijuana operation or a small baby.

An Atom Feed:
Rob Kelley first requested an RSS feed back in January of 2005. At the time, every one of my updates was handcoded in JavaScript (because being obtusely perverse in your coding methods is a necessity for any real software engineer) so his request was only met with apology from me and mocking from Mike. Now that the news updates are database-driven, I have a simple Java process generating an Atom feed every time I post something inane. If you would like to take advantage of this, click on the orange Feed icon next to the Mail icon at the top of the page. If you don't know what good a web feed is, read about it here .

Consolidated Content:
Every (remaining) section of the site has been examined through the critical lens of "who the hell would really read that anyhow?" and lots of useless clutter has been removed. The main focal point of the site has been the daily news updates for three years now -- it's time to accentuate this like a magnifying glass on an ant.

Admin Console:
To capably handle this incredible ejaculation of new content, I've created an online administrative console that keeps my finger on the pulse of the URI! Zone. From here, I can do such fun things as keep track of new polls, fix typos that Rob catches, and punish my friends' blogs by pushing them to the bottom of the list when they fail to update regularly. (Trendy blogs will continue to appear in alphabetical order).

If there are any other features you'd like to see on the URI! Zone, or you discover any bugs that I intentionally put there to see how observant you are, please let me know! In the meantime, happy 12th birthday to the website originally known as the URI! Domain -- may the next twelve be even better!

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