Sparks from the Smithy Changes

If you take a moment to look at Sparks from the Smithy, you may notice that things look a little bit different than they have previously. This is because I’ve started using WordPress to run the site instead of my hand-made system.

I converted my technical blog, esmithy.net, over to WordPress a while back, and I’ve been pretty happy with it, so it was time to convert Sparks as well. It took a while to get around to it, so we haven’t been posting much lately. There are a few nifty features to benefit you as a reader:

• You can search to find posts
• Posts are grouped by year in the sidebar
• You get to decide how or if you get notified about new postings

With notifications, there are a few options.

You can subscribe to the RSS feed. There is actually a feed for posts as well as for comments that people leave. The links to both are in the sidebar to the right. If you don’t know what to do with an RSS feed, you can ignore this option, or learn about it.

You can register with the site. If you register with the site, you can elect to get an email when a new post is published. You can also choose if you would like the email to be in plain text or to be nicely formatted with HTML. Furthermore, if you’re registered, you don’t have to fill in any information when you make a comment — the site remembers who you are. And if your email address changes, you can update it with your registration yourself.

You can subscribe with just your email address. This is kind of like registering — you’ll get an email message when a new post is published — but you don’t have as much control over the mail format, and you still have to say who you are when you leave a comment. You can unsubscribe any time you want, too. To subscribe, just provide your email address below (assuming you’re not already registered):

Finally, if you’re just freaking out, leave a comment below or send me an email telling me what kind of notification you want and I’ll set it up for you. But you need to do one of the things here to keep getting notifications — we don’t plan to send out manual emails anymore.