UPDATE: Change that I can blog in.

UPDATE: Have a look! Look closer!

Looking Closer 2.0 is coming.

Let’s face it… LookingCloser.org is a mess. I started building it in 1996, if I recall, with no training in website design. The whole mess has been designed with FrontPage, basically training myself as I went. (Yes, I can hear you groaning.) It’s rattled along like the tracks like a train made out of tin cans for a decade. I’m proud of the cargo that has been loaded on and off over the years, but the vehicle itself is falling apart at the seams.

Time for a change.

Enter Dave Von Bieker, a web designer who… get this… volunteered to do this for me. In intend to thank him, don’t get me wrong. But where many have offered their services over the years for a price I couldn’t pay (no, I really don’t make money doing this), Dave was excited about the project and wanted to take it on for fun. He wrote to me and gave me something I particularly value: blunt, honest criticism… offered with care and grace.

So, with Dave’s help, I’m cooking up a new version of Looking Closer. It’ll consolidate all of my various web-content archives — the reviews, the interviews, the Auralia Thread materials, the Through a Screen Darkly stuff, the blog entries, EVERYTHING — in one clean WordPress site.

Oh, there will be growing pains for a while. I have to go through piles and piles of content to decide what needs revision, what needs to be tossed, and what deserves to be up front and center. For a while, big sections of the archive will probably be inaccessible. But I’ll work slowly and steadily to bring it all back online.

So bear with us.

And yes, eventually this particular blog will come to a crashing halt, with a note referring you to the blog’s new location. Soon, I’ll prompt you to update your bookmarks to lookingcloser.org, if that isn’t your starting point already.

That’s the news.