New look, same great taste!

That's what food products always say when they change the label, right?

Now that I'm up to about 270 posts, it was becoming really unwieldy to look back through old stuff. New readers, in particular, would be hampered in how they could sample previous posts. So I updated to a new template that, if it's working as it should, will give readers easy access to older stuff in two ways:

First, the "archives" element on the left shows titles of posts, and you can expand/collapse time periods as needed.

Second, I've added topical labels to all of the posts, and put an index to the labels below the chronological archive element. That way, if you're interested in finding where I've ranted about Phil Hellmuth, or want to find the posts somehow relating to poker history, or all the stories that took place at the Hilton, you should be able to do so easily. (And not all of the labels start with "h"!)

Next task: Figuring out how to move those damn ads from the bottom of the page to the side margin, so that more people will click on them. :-) I am completely in the dark about HTML, so each time I do something new, it takes some time to move up the learning curve. (Looking back through old posts to attach the labels, I was reminded of the first time I tried italics, first time I put something in bold type, first time I used a photo, first time I embedded a video clip, etc. I'm kind of retarded, but I am capable of learning slowly....)

As always, comments--private or public--are welcome.

Addendum, December 24, 2007

A commenter asked where the ads went. I hadn't even noticed that somehow in the process of switching templates the ads somehow vanished. Like I said, this is all new and mysterious and experimental to me. I look at Google's "AdSense" help pages and my eyes glaze over with bafflement. Anyway, I think that I have now managed to get the ads back and put them in the left margin. I wanted them over on the right, with narrower content. But I can't find a pre-made template that allows page elements on both the right and the left of the posts.

Don't be surprised if you keep finding changes here over the next several days as I fiddle with making all of this work right.