I've added a Currently Reading block to the left side. I'll be putting the titles and author information of any books that I'm reading at a given time along with a link to it on Amazon.com. I'm hoping that this will serve as a bit of self-accountability to make me read more. I've been slacking recently in that regard.

Along with that comes a new Book Reviews topic heading where I will post my thoughts on the books once I'm done with them. Again, this is mostly self serving but, then again, so is the rest of this site for the most part. :-)

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[Ed. note -- Living History by Hillary Rodham Clinton Rodham (with a wink and a nod to Rich Galen) will NOT be read and reviewed. Don't hold your breath waiting for it...]

I got a kick out of this post by Moose but only because I've been thinking about creating a pseudo-private area on my site.

I successfully installed and configured Tom Willett's Menu Plugin. I found it shortly after I had editted a small piece of Geeklog's internal code in order to add the Blog Links to the Sections menu on the left. I really didn't want to edit it at all because upgrading is a huge pain when you have to port over all of your changes. Luckily it was only a small change and was easy enough to undo.

Anyway, this version of the Menu plugin lets you set up custom menus without changing the core system. It also uses the existing security group heirarchy that you've defined for users. These are Good Things.

It doesn't look any different but it makes my future life much better.

Just in case anyone cares, I have removed the blog and news feeds from the right side of the screen and put them on their own page. This will let me include a lot more feeds without making the front page scroll forever. It also lets me provide links to blogs that don't have RSS feeds but that I still want to monitor. I'll be adding a link to that page in the Sections block on the left Real Soon Now.

I also moved the Older Stories block to the right side (where the blogs used to be). Not only does it shorten the left side some and even things out a bit, but it just seemed more fitting to have it under the What's New block.

Or maybe I'm just getting loopy...

So I've now entered the world of blogging, huh? What, exactly, that means I have no idea. But, I had space on a server and it seemed a shame to let it go to waste.

As this is my first real post, I guess I'll provide some background.