I’ve been doing a lot of work on my web sites lately, on the premise that when my ankylosing spondylitis flares up (as it did from mid-October to early November), I’m better able to write code than I am to write blog entries. (This has happened before; during the spring flare season I coded a whole pile of things, too: see this entry and this entry.) I can’t quite explain why, but it seems to work, and at least I don’t feel unproductive.

On this site, I’ve changed the front page again (see previous entry). While I liked the previous design in that it aggregated all my recent blogging activity from all my blogs, it was a bit buggy, and the sheer volume of Map Room posts drowned out everything else. Now each blog has its own section, with the most recent five posts for each blog. I’ve done similar redesigns on the Books and Reptiles pages; I’m still not happy with the latter, and expect to tinker some more with it. This blog has had a few stylistic changes as well, and I’m going to fool around with the category archives, too. On a more significant note, the contact page has had more detail added to it: media and reptile inquiries get additional fields in their contact forms.

The Map Room was a little more quiet during this period due to the pain, and a bit of burnout, too; I still managed to redesign the site a bit more than a week ago. My goal was to reduce clutter, and I did so by ditching the blogroll, rearranging the ads and increasing overall white space. While comment spam has been more or less vanquished, I still get a lot of bonehead submissions through the link suggestion form, so I tightened that up yesterday.

To my surprise, I’ve been posting fairly frequently to Ankylose This! — if you haven’t checked in on it lately, you may want to see what I’ve been writing about.

It’s only about a year behind schedule, but Gartersnake.info finally got its store last week, containing the usual CafePress tchotchkes, knickknacks, and other treasures — but with garter snakes on them! I’ve put up a bunch of stuff so far, but I’m hoping to add more over the next couple of days.