It’s been a while since my last update here; twelve days, according to the date below.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks working really hard on my search engine, at all hours of the day and night. That’s just my working method, I suppose: intense periods of activity punctuated by sleep and sloth, and none of it at the times you’d usually expect a person to be doing it. Hey, it works for me, and I’m glad that I’m not obliged to shoehorn my circadian arhythmia into a fixed working day.

My effort has paid off. I have a working search engine, and I celebrated it by taking a long weekend. Thursday was a public holiday here, and like most of the rest of the population of Belgium, I also took Friday off to make it a four-day weekend. And a very relaxing weekend it has been, too.

One thing I have been over the past few days is working on a new, improved template for this site. I think that I’ve come up with something rather nice. It’s not a radical departure, but it’s more strictly standards-based, making better use of semantic markup and CSS than the current layout. I’m also going for a slightly more traditional typographical look.

It’s part of a bigger change: I’m planning to move to a UML server, which is a system for providing multiple virtual hosts on a single machine. The advantage is that I can get a machine with root access and the ability to install all the software I want, at a much cheaper price than for a dedicated server. It’s perfect for my requirements, and I’ve been hearing a lot of good comments about UML.

However, until I have sorted out the software that I’m going to use, there’s no point paying for the UML hosting. I’m going to work on an improved CMS first, then take it live when it’s ready. When is that? I don’t know...