Welcome to the new Slashdong.

It's been over 7 years since I finally got this site running, put up my hastily crafted circuit board dildo in the header, and went to work becoming the minor blogging sensation I am today. While I've spent that whole time giving talks and being active in sex tech in one form or another, in the past few years the site itself had really fallen apart. I moved from MovableType to Jekyll, futzed with the sidebar a bit every so often, but got to the point of only having 3-4 posts a year. Partially because I felt like I was running out of stuff to say, and partially because the site itself just didn't feel right. I'd also been busy bringing up projects like OpenYou and whatever else I'd decided to hack together on my github account.

Around February 2012, for some reason that changed. With some of the new toys that have been coming out, and well as correspondances I've had with people since Art&&Code last year and the release of the Pen15, I've started feeling reinvigorated about the topic of sex, technology, and open source. With that, I decided to redo the look of the site. The first goal was a new simplified, easy to read look. I've had a long problem with tiny fonts and weird color combinations that make things damn near impossible to read, a problem I've hopefully fixed in this round. Next up was to get rid of the tons of different sections, since I had a blog, plus "articles" and "projects", which were really just extra long blog posts. I figure if people want to find certain information, they can search on it and it'll come up.

Of course, the header needed a change, too. My 3DSMax skills were awesome (read: making a curve, hitting lathe, adding a texture), but it's time for a logo that better fits the site. Thanks to Kelly Moore of Counter-productive Productions, we now have the Slashdongle:

It's everything I could've dreamed of and more, and yes, there will be Slashdongle merchandising soon.

There's still things left to be done. The site is being released before it's finished just because it'll never actually be finished. I could continue painting my bikeshed with a yak-hair brush, or just push it out and finish things as I get time. So, tasks left over include:

• Adding categories to all posts
• Updating About because I'm not in my 20's anymore
• Integrating old articles and projects, patching missing links
• Fixing botched markdown and HTML

Also, I'm starting to integrate some of my older sites into this one.

I'm slowly moving posts from MMOrgy that I wrote (we had multiple authors there) over to this site. MMOrgy stopped getting new content around 5 years ago now, and I'd really like to EOL the site and condense down to just slashdong.

So, there ya go. Plans laid out, and hopefully a new, bright future for Slashdong. Either that or I'll have just spent 2 months fucking with CSS and jekyll for nothing and let the thing stagnate again for another 7 years.