I made some pretty major changes/updates/additions to the site today.
First, the Nonfiction section has been significantly reorganized. There’s a new category for “Opinion & Commentary” (for mid- to long-length material) and the “Mini-Rants” category is now, simply, “Rants” (for short- to mid-length biting commentary).
You may notice something missing, too.
That’s right; the ‘Front Page Rant’ no longer has its own category. The semi-regular column has long outgrown its name (it stopped being a ‘rant,’ per se, a few years ago now, and with the new site it no longer has a permanent home on the front page either), so it was time to retire it. The earliest of the FPRs—the ones which were more like my later mini-rants—are mostly in the “Rants” category now, and the long-form opinion columns that you all know and love are in the “Opinion & Commentary” category. A few of the early FPRs that were particularly personal have been moved into the Life Blog.
I also adjusted the “All About Me” section to match my changes to the “About the Site” section the other day (although there have been virtually no actual content changes . . . yet). The main “All About Me” link goes to my bio and rundown, and the “Pictures of Me” now appear as a sub-item in the menu (along with “My Technology,” which has been there since the redesign).
In addition to the reorganization, I have added some long-lost material that I uncovered when cleaning my old room in Bedford.
If you go way back to the last page of the “Opinion & Commentary” category in the “Nonfiction” section, you’ll find my 1998 speech on behalf of the Liberty High School PTSA to the Bedford County School Board.
Also, in the “Religious” category of the “Nonfiction” section there are two never-before-published additions: my 2000 Lane Memorial UMC Youth Sunday sermon (“Conceptual Christianity”) and my 2000 speech to Main Street UMC about Harvest of Hope.
In “Pictures of Me” (under “All About Me”) there are several new additions from my childhood and from my high school years.
In the “Photography” section (which is under “Random”), you’ll find a few new pictures in the “People & Their Creations” and “Power & Beauty of Nature” photo collections.
Enjoy!
Now I’d like to ask a favor of any of you who happen to have been Liberty High School students for the 1999-2000 school year. I wrote an opinion column and occasional articles for the LHS Sentinel newspaper that year, and all of the original files for those articles and columns are gone. I want to recover all the material I wrote for that publication and republish them on my website (the opinion columns, especially, as they were the predecessor to the Front Page Rant and my other opinion/commentary work).
If you have any LHS Sentinels from that year with articles by me in them, please let me know!