I apologize for the relative radio silence here the past few very tumultuous weeks. What you see now is the result of that silence. This is the first redesign of Hoystory.com in the past four or five years. The web design system I had been using to customize the design and layout ceased to be supported about two years ago, and with each passing year I worried that the development of the WordPress CMS would trigger something in that defunct builder to break the site. Not only that, but with the way the web design is rapidly changing, a site really needs a redesign every few years.

Over the past year, I've re-designed my business site, Hoy Consulting, and created Restricted Arms, using WordPress and Oxygen Builder. The latter is one of the fastest-growing WordPress development plugins on the market today. It's generally pretty lightweight and allows for a lot of customization, including being responsive when viewed on mobile devices.

That being said, with great power comes…a requirement to be more knowledgeable about css, php, and javascript. I've learned quite a bit designing and doing the coding for each of these sites over the past few months.

It wasn't all smooth sailing. For some bizarre reason quite a few of the audio files of my appearances on Dave Congalton's radio show didn't like the change that was made, requiring me to re-upload approximately 70 percent of them so that the player would show up. I also had a periodic problem with archive templates only being editable once before causing some problem and preventing me from opening them to make adjustments. I managed to find a workaround and by the time I woke up this morning the problem seems to have disappeared.

There are still a few minor things here and there that I want to tweak or change, but for the most part I'm pretty happy with the end result. I hope you are too. Feel free to leave comments and feedback below, or you can email me directly via the link on my About page.

Oh, and if you know of someone who would like a website created for them—including copywriting, graphic design, photography, etc., please send them my way!

One minor thing to note: You may see the image above of the typewriter a whole lot if you go poking around the archives. Back in the early days of blogs and the web, having what is called a "featured image" really wasn't a thing. Sure you would insert some screenshots or photos of some type into the article when appropriate, but it wasn't a consistent thing. In recent years that's changed. As you can see from the single post view, the lack of a featured image with this new design would cause readability problems as the text would be shifted up into the header. So, this typewriter image is the default image you'll see on those older posts where there was no image.