it's coming to three years and this website needs overhauling. well maybe not an overhaul - no radical redesign but just some tweaking and changes. i want to keep the display format, but use more css style sheets. and also i want to sift content some more and have three separate blogs.

1) the friends-only blog was originally meant to keep very private or desperately unhappy entries to only the closest friends, but already the content on the two blogs is differing significantly, and also going into two different colour schemes. if i can ip-restrict specific posts within the private folder or else create more folders with separate logins, it will be a good thing. in this scenario everyone will have to log in to view any content, but displayed content will be different, so that von should log in and see all the posts except the one on which i'm talking about his surprise party, and poach would not get any of the chinese entries, since her browser refuses to display chinese fonts, and so on. this might take a bit of figuring out and needs more work.

2) i have also been thinking about language-specific posts and that i should revive the chinese blog. it occurs to me that even if i decide not to write much in chinese i do link to chinese articles and sources and quote chinese poems and songs, so they should probably be filtered out for sinophones only. the chinese posts do take longer to load, and it's both a waste of their time and my bandwidth when they cannot read it. there are concerns about whether to spend so much effort on keeping one. cindy's chinese journal has tailed off, even though i check it fairly often. it's just like i said in my first post:

"晓晴身在上海，用中文写作可算是入乡随俗，在上海的朋友也可阅读。我可不希望我写了中文日记，结果是东施效颦！你瞧我们这一群都是传统英校生， 平时交谈绝少用汉语，除了两三人偶而会翻阅中文书籍，很难指望其他人会愿意阅读中文。我用中文写日记，想必要累着这些朋友们“受罪” 。"

nevertheless, the main blog entry page, as you will see, has now got three options. when i get some time over springbreak i will transfer chinese posts. (of course, it will mean havoc for the present colour scheme. i am still considering this.) future chinese posts, however, will go there.

3) i'm thinking of adding a reading blog to the bookpage and moving book remarks off the main blog, and double-posting on our shared reading page and my own. and maybe also adding a group food log with registration posting privileges like poach's book blog. all of this is meant to make the entire website hold something of interest for people, so that they don't simply bookmark the main blog.

4) updating content: poor julian has been complaining for two years that he still hasn't got an entry in the friends page, and anyway all the information is outdated as we have all graduated. i'm reluctant to get rid of the page that says that i'm a fourth year at uva though.

5) i may also finally add a comments feature. (yes su-lin) what form i don't yet know. tag board and other such are ugly and don't have archiving functions and besides from what i can see it is more often down than not. also i prefer something pegged to the entry, so forums are no good. although i've gone as far as putting up a temporary forum. this is friends-only plus a few others so don't shout about it. i can't activate an automated comments feature and if i used haloscan and some such i'll have to insert script for individual entries (i do this on notepad, see.), so very lecheh.

6) comments, suggestions, whatever. bring 'em on.