Blog Master G

“The homepage is dead, long live the Blog!” –Jordan Reed

My site’s primary index template (index.php) now contains the following code (thanks, Ben, for pointing me to the PHP header redirect after realizing that a modification of my .htaccess file would not work for this tweak, due to site content leveraging the /index.php?id=XX format):

<?php
if (!$id) {
header(“Location: http://blogmasterg.com/life/”); /* Redirect browser */
/* Make sure that code below does not get executed when we redirect. */
exit;
}
?>

Translation: gabeanderson.com is now gabeanderson.com: life. My blog is the new home page for my site.

I first pondered this last week and decided to go with Jordan‘s great suggestion, ala Wil Wheaton dot net… for now anyway. Silus also had some cool suggestions, but they would require more significant overhauling of my current site architecture… maybe some day soon.

As it stands, my new site navigation is down, though not by much, to 12 items instead of 14. By removing the home page from my site and linking to my about page from my new welcome page, I was able to remove those two items from the navigation. I also removed my writing page from the main navigation last week and plopped it under archives since (1) my blog is where I do most of my writing these days and (2) the writing section was so outdated (i.e., it’s been nearly two years since I’ve had anything published outside this blog). So those 3 minus 14 equals 11 plus my newest site addition, Google Galore, equals 12.