It has always been my goal to write more on my blog. I enjoy writing but I have not had a chance to really spend the time to sit down and write. Of course, one thing that has always stopped me is knowing that my blog doesn't look the way I want it to, but this has now changed.

I've been off from work for the holidays and during most of this time I've been in front of my Mac coding away. My first major change on the site was switching the markup and css to use YUI - Yahoo's User Interface libraries.

YUI is brilliant library that helps to speed up the development of any web site by providing code that can just be inserted into your site and will work on any of the main browsers out there. As a developer, I don't need to worry - for the most part - about differences in which IE6 will render a page than Firefox 3.

So, I've done the YUI switch by going in each of my templates on my site and changing the markup and css to create a much more markup efficient site.

As you'll also notice the blog looks considerably different. I went through and overrode nearly every template (and some actions) in the blog engine to create the custom look I desire. This took a long time.

After that, I've been adding a lot more social features onto the site with the automatic inclusion of my twitter and flickr feeds, with plenty more features to come.

Overall, this the the first phase complete. This is my second week off from work for the winter holidays and I've spent most of it in front of the Mac coding away. I'm going to relax the reminder of my time off and will now work on new features and my writing in the future. I've got plenty of ideas of things to write about including how to use Delicious more effectively.

I'm signing off now, but please let me know if you find any bugs in the site. I already know of at least one on the About page with a gap in the images, but I'm sure there will be a few more.

It's been many, many years since the last redesign of mahal dot org.

I've been meaning to rebuilt the web site for quite some time now but have always been so busy to do so. I still don't have all the time in the world, but I managed to sneak some time between projects to work on it.

As you can see, this is clean fresh look. I wanted to keep it simple as I feel the key element in this site is the information given, especially through its articles.

As return visitors will notice, the blog entries over the past few years have all disappeared. I'm using a new blog engine in here, so at first I was going to migrate the data. However, as I read through the posts, I decided clean start would be the best to keep entries organized and professional.

I now plan on updating articles, and writing new ones so that I can build the article section. I feel I have so much to share, but I have always wanted a solid system to be able to share that information with you. Some of my older articles definitely need to be updated. I read over a few and thought about dropping them completely, but decided to keep them and just write new current ones.

Don't think of this site as staying now as it is. I've got many new features to implement and to improve the site, including AJAX based features, but remember, with all good UI design, they will appear when needed and not just because it's cool.

I'd love to hear comments from you, so please let me know what you think.

Thanks,

Davinder Mahal