While I spend most of my days working as a website designer, I’ve neglected my own personal blog for some time now. I’ve done very little upkeep aside from the two or three entries I post each month. The addition to photos to some recent entries has been a nice change, and I hope to keep at it. This blog still runs on WordPress 1.5, which is exactly what I first installed when I started blogging back in 2004. I really do need to upgrade at some point.

I took some time today to adjust a few things on this blog. Most are not very noticeable, and some are on the backend, so I’ll point them out:

• No More Categories – I found the list of categories to be useless so I got rid of it and turned two items, the PK Photo Album and Short Stories into graphic links. This should have been done long ago – I’ve kept the photo album fairly up-to-date, but it was near impossible to find before because the link was lost among the other categories
• Un-2.0 – I took out Twitter, the Technorati link, and the unseen Statcounter code from the side bar
• Anti-Spam – after two years of being bombarded by spam bots, I installed Spam Karma which promises to sift out all the ED and violent porno links from my comments

I’ve also decided to discontinue PK Eats and PK Cinema. In less busier times, having these three constantly updated would have worked, but I have enough trouble keeping just one afloat. You can, however, find my writings about New York restaurants on Gobbl, our foodie blogging community. I miss writing about movies, so I’ll continue doing that on this blog in the future.

I have a few other things on my wish list for this blog that won’t happen for some time. I’m hoping that once I upgrade to a more recent version of WordPress, I’ll be able to have a better system for archiving older entries instead of clumsily listing out every single month since April 2004. Gosh, has it been that long already?

Unrelated, just wanted to say some quick things about recent reading activity: I finally finished Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, a very trying two-month process but one that was clearly worth the effort. The book left me with a number of different thoughts and ideas, some which I whole-heartedly agree with and others I’ve easily dismissed, but one thing (and this is very anti-intellectual) that disappointed me was how Dagny so easily discarded Hank Rearden for John Galt. That ice queen! I’m now breezing through Paul Auster’s Mr. Vertigo, and it feels great to carry a book only a few hundred pages long. It’s reminding me how much I missed first-person narratives.