I’ve made several small changes/additions to my blog in the past few days.

Usability

• Featured Posts - Now there’s a small section in my sidebar to display a few display-worthy posts. When I find a new blog, something like this is the first thing I look for to determine how I feel about it. Before there was only a Recent Posts list, so this should help new readers make up their mind about me.
• Recent Posts list fixed - A few days ago, I noticed several of my posts weren’t being displayed. After several re-installations and a very high level on my frustration-ometer, I realized it was a simple matter of ticking a checkbox in my admin panel.
• Faster-loading images - Some of the images here were saved as jpg’s when they could be gif’s without any loss of quality. So just a few quick conversions and loading time might have decreased slightly.

Cosmetic

• More “grunge” elements and Celtic-inspired decoration - I just added a few more tears, smudges, and splotches to the header. I also drew up a quick corner piece for the area between the content and the footer. It was duplicated and flipped to fit all for bottom corners (scroll down a little bit).
• More background images - I added a few more background images while trying to keep the page load time down. There’s one for the h1 titles and the comment form. Leave a comment to check it out.

Why do you care about any of this?

With some of this stuff out of the way, you are now reading the blog of a more focused person. Now I’ll get back to posting some real articles.