I've had the painters and decorators in

So currybetdotnet has been getting the annual wash'n'brush up for the new year. Well, it is a bit late for the new year, but it has taken me a while to get round to it.

I was really pleased when Paul Hammond's old site visually compared a whole host of blogs, not only because he included currybetdotnet, but also because from one full-page screengrab of my homepage it didn't look particularly like any other blog. However, I started to get bored with it, and more importantly, I couldn't see how I could integrate the web services from Furl and Flickr into that look.

I also needed to do a clean install of Movable Type. A particularly virulent attack of comment and trackback spam a while ago seemed to corrupt my database files, which meant I was getting 500 Internal Server error messages every time I re-built the site or approved a comment. Very tiresome. And then the reinstall didn't go very smoothly, which left me unable to post for a couple of weeks, until I started using Filezilla as my FTP client. I ended up having to scrub the database, so have then had to re-edit by hand two years worth of archive posts to remove the comment entry forms and trackback RDF data. (Just as well I had a delayed train journey back from my trip to Manchester this weekend in order to complete the work.)

And in my world if you are going to go to all that trouble you may just as well redesign the whole thing.

So goodbye old currybetdotnet, with your silly hand-written headings, and photolog and linklog that have been deprecated in favour of third-party web services....

...and hello up-and-running new version - even if you are still a little rough around the edges...

No doubt the least useful change is "liberating" the code that rotates JPEG files on the BBC homepage to flick through a selection of my recent photographs in the banner area of the site.

<added>I should point out the version referred to in this post lasted all of around three months until the great server disaster of 2005 meant I had to rebuild it all again</added>