One great thing about this past week’s Triangle Bloggers Conference is that it inspired me to get off my duff and fix up the site I made for my family’s ALS Race for Research Foundation. The old site was static HTML 4 and with completely table-driven layouts. This was fine for when it was originally designed…in 2001. (Actually, it was a bit outdated even then, but I was determined to make it work on all browsers, including the execreble WebTV that my aunt was using at the time.)

Anyways, I installed Textpattern 1.0rc1 on the site, ported all of the content, set up a few permanent redirects for the static HTML URLs to point to Textpattern’s articles, and rebuilt the layout using some hastily thrown together CSS that I stole borrowed from various places. In the end, it’s not terribly exciting to look at, but it is a major improvement over what was there before. Plus, now it is backed with a content management system, which may make it easier for those in my family to create their own content and put it up themselves. I can only hope.