To make my blog more distinctive, unique, and me, I’ve implemented 4 broad new changes to the design and layout of the blog.

First, I’ve added a “links” area to the top of the blog that filters the last five “links” category posts and highlights the most recent one. This is cool, because now I can post a quick link to this or that, and have it rotate into the site without touching content. Or, at least that’s the theory. WP still counts those as posts, so I can’t say “Show me 15 posts on the front page” anymore. Still, I’ll resolve that sometime, I’m sure.

Second, I’ve added the “I, Charity Case” category on the sidebar. I figure that my google ads are annoying on the front page, so I’ve turned them off by default. If *you* want to look at them, please do. It would be nice to eventually make some income of this blog–tuition is 40 grand.

Third, I’ve added two new plugins. One you might find more useful than the other. The first is my anti-spam plugin, the only anti-spam solution running on this blog. And since I started using my own plugin, I have had no (0) spam. They never even get to the moderation queue. The second is polite-ifier to turn inconsiderate comments into more high class ones. Now my comments look like, “**** you, you *** ***** ** ** ****”, which is a nice break on the eyes.

Fourth, I’ve patched a dangerous vulnerability in the default Wordpress installation.

That’s all, folks!