The last couple weeks have been perhaps the longest stint I've taken away from blogging since launching 4 years ago (The Elephant in the Room). I wasn't expecting to take a leave of absence, but life is funny that way. Yeah, that's it … funny.

Anyway, I've been working here and there on updating the site for better performance and also to offer some short-form posts along with my normally long-winded ones. Bottom-line: more stuff for you!

Because of my absence, I wanted to launch the improved theme ASAP. Along the way however, I ran into considerable difficulty getting it to work properly with various Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) releases. IE uses a proprietary rendering engine that doesn't exactly work well with common web standards, so you have to jerry-rig the code to make it to work with IE. Even worse, once you finally get it to work with one version of IE, that doesn't necessarily mean it'll work with other versions of IE. Picture the government getting involved in web browsers … and how bad they'd (naturally) screw it all up. That's Microsoft IE in a nutshell.

I can't recommend enough using a better browser. Firefox is awesome. Pale Moon is an awesome version of Firefox tweaked for Windows operating systems. Google Chrome is terrific too. This site (and most others) will look and operate better for you if you're using one of these browsers. IE is the worst. This site (and most others) will look and operate differently if you insist on using IE.

As soon as this note is posted, I'm going to switch over to the new and improved site. It'll be a few more days before I can implement the new (additional) post formats (because I used up my time trying to get the site to work with IE), but I'm positive you'll find them valuable once fully implemented. If you run into any issues, please let me know.

And of course, Rule 5 will be back in business here ASAP (either late tonight or sometime tomorrow)!

Thank you for your patience and continued visits. You're the reason I blog as much as I can (it sure ain't for the money doh! ).

**Okay, the navigation menu at the top worked great when I tested it (even using the plugin "Theme Test Drive") but doesn't work live. Go figure. Sorry. I'll have to work on that later this evening.**