Well, after a long wait, the new version of my site is now up and running.

As always, the last 10% of the changes took longer to finish than I anticipated. The main changes are as follows:

• Moved navigation menu to top of page.
• Added 'About Me' section
• Added to disclaimer
• Removed Authors widget and replaced with Calendar
• Moved Search from header to right sidebar

A few other features are worth mentioing in passing. I have included a Windows Live Messenger status widget in the 'About Me', so that you can easily see if I'm online and available to chat. I will post a separate entry about how I did this. I have also added a ClustrMap, which shows the geographical locations of the visitors to my site. This was very easy to set up, and again, I will write about this another time.

For now, I hope you like the new look and agree that it's a major improvement over the previous version.

The software I use for my website is called BlogEngine.NET. It is an open-source blogging platform, which is both feature-rich and simple to use. I currently use version 1.3.1, but version 1.4 has just been released.

The latest release contains a number of enhancements, including:

• a new widget-based page designer
• a new provider model for database access, supporting MySQL, VistaDB, SQL Server and others
• improvements to the extension model
• support for web 3.0 micro-formats (FOAF, SIOC and APML)
• various bug fixes and performance improvements

I haven't blogged for a while because I've had a lot of stuff going on the past few weeks. I've just had a week off work to do some long-awaited projects around the house and garden.

I've also been working on a new version of my site. It still uses the BlogEngine core, but I'm using a newer version. The site layout is not that different from the current version, I've just moved a few things around and added some new features which I hope regular visitors will appreciate.  I would have had it finished sooner, only I've had to learn a lot of CSS to figure out how to get things how I want them.

So, I'm still here, and will be back to regular blogging frequency very soon!