• The Argentina’s Travel Guide [ATG] team has grown to three full-time people and more than a dozen writers.  You guys totally rock.
• We have more than doubled the traffic.
• We completed a partial redesign of the site (how do you like it?)
• We have substantially grown the site, in articles, destination guides, trip planning advice, and photo album coverage.
• We have many new features, such as Digg-style voting, fancy-formatted printing, better commenting and contact form features, a way for authors to apply right from the site, and a Photo of the Week feature.
• We’ve launched a discussion forum, which is picking up.
• We’ve launched a great business directory.
• We have a free, downloadable Family Guide nearing completion.
• We have email marketing system almost done.

I also went to a wedding in Brazil, on a fly-fishing trip to Patagonia with Dad, and I started taking Tango classes.  Christmas and New Year’s also happened in there somewhere.

It’s safe to say that the year is off to a good start!

I just spent the last few hours clearing my gmail inbox. I don’t feel nearly as free and clear as I thought I would. Ok, maybe a little bit. There is a bit of satisfaction from in reading that “No new mail?…” line.

What do you think, is it actually productive?

After 2 years of having essentially the same design, I decided it was time to freshen things up around here. I’m most interested in improving usability, and towards that end I still have many more ideas. I’m also interested in more accurately conveying my personality and my new direction through the new design. Like most of my redesigns though, I started by doing the layout work, picking the colors, and changing the overall look. Read more…

Yes, it’s sad but true. The (bad) permalink structure I was using under my old host, Netfirms, didn’t transfer, so that means all the deep links I’ve accumulated over the years are now invalid. That hurts!

But I’ve decided to stick with the server move anyway. I’m tired of my old host and ready for a change and a little housekeeping. Besides, it corresponds with a major step in the direction of the blog, so maybe it’s good to be getting a fresh start.

Another side-effect of the server change is that the domain name is a little haywire, but this should be resolved within a couple of days.

Don’t use this:

/%post_id%/%postname%/

In fact, don’t use anything with %post_id% in it if you think you might ever migrate your blog. It turns out that when you export a wordpress database and import it into a clean installation, the post IDs change. This means that ALL the supposedly permanent URLs of my posts changed, rendering all incoming deep links useless.

If you know even a smidgen about SEO, you understand how much this sucks, so if you’re setting up your WP installation for the first time, my permalink structure advice would be to use the default date-and-postname suggestion. It’s a safe bet.