Very exciting - tomorrow at 8:00am I jet off to Sydney and hop onto a Qantas 747 non-stop to San Francisco. MacWorld Expo and Conference is being held in San Francisco from 5 - 9 January 2009 and I will be over there leading a school excursion with some of my senior students from Canberra Grammar School. Make sure you check the blog and website often, as I will be posting regular updates (and I can even do this directly from my iPhone, nifty hey?).

How come I can’t get no Tang ’round here? may have been a question you were asking when using the old Silicon Kid website. In particular, about why the website was never updated!

Alright, to start with I realise that my old website went a bit…stale…at the end there (i.e. lack of updates). I do not wish for that issue to repeat with this new site. I have built this site in a brand spanking new Content Management System (Wordpress 2.7) which makes it much easier and flexible to manage content. In fact, for a Spark Notes-like version of ways in which this new site improves upon the old:

• The WordPress CMS is much more flexible in ways to post content. For example, I can cross-post content from my Flickr and Twitter accounts and also blog directly from my iPhone. This just makes it easier to update the site, so it (should) not go stale due to lack of updates.
• I have outsourced the updating of The Silicon Kid Archive to one of my colleagues, who will always make sure the archive is up-to-date (avoiding the situation, present on the old website, where I would be away and not update the archive for several weeks).
• You can now add comments to all posts on the website. Hooray!
• Photos can say 1000 words? Well, in that case I would prefer to post a photo rather than have to write 1000 words. As mentioned in the first point, WordPress links in with my Flickr account so I can moblog on the go directly from my iPhone.
• If you don’t want to visit the website every day for updates you can now subscribe. We have a few options available. For those who use RSS you can subscribe to the pure RSS feed (there is a link to the feed at the bottom of the website). Alternatively, if you don’t know about RSS (and really don’t care…) pop your email address into the Subscribe box on the left-hand side of the website and updates will be delivered each day directly into your email.

There is plenty more which we have improved upon for this website, so take a gander at the Website Help! page for more information (or click the big blue question mark icon in the menu bar).

UPDATE (22/12/08 @ 20:45): Thanks to the great people at Funnelback the search index has been successfully updated and the Silicon Kid website search is now working!

UPDATE (21/12/08 @ 08:00): You may have noticed that if you use the Funnelback Search all the results are still pointing to the old website, and you get 404 errors galore! This is because we could only reindex the website once it had been made live on the internet. This has been scheduled for early Sunday (21/12/08) morning. There was a slight problem with the scheduled Sunday update, and the great people at Funnelback are working on getting this resolved right now. The search engine should be updated ASAP, so please bear with us.