Oct. 18th, 2009:

Three new entries in "The Journal of Unfortunate Food", including the return of the dreaded Clamato.

Feb. 18th, 2009:

Yeah, I know, things have been kinda stagnant around here for a long time now... but as of today, there's a whole metric boatload of new stuff here!

Of course, some of the biggest changes are way down in the nuts and bolts under the hood. First of all, as you may have noticed by the change in the site's address, the Den has left its old home at Texas.Net. There's a variety of reasons for that, but the primary one is that I finally got around to switching from dial-up to broadband. Keeping everything at the old ISP would've been problematic since, for security reasons, there's certain things you can't do with your account there unless you're actually dialed into it through their modem bank; plus, their hosting was pretty basic and wouldn't allow me to do some of the more ambitious things I wanted to do (like PHP or server-side includes) in renovating the site... and frankly, it doesn't seem as if the residential-user side of their ISP business is a big priority to them anymore anyway; so, all things considered, it was long past time to move on to a more copasetic host. Besides, this way my hosting is no longer tied to whoever my ISP happens to be, so if my current broadband provider cheeses me off I can always jump ship to one of their competitors without having to redo everything again.

The other under-the-hood change is that the old frame-based layout is gone. In its place is a better layout scheme which uses CSS and a bit of PHP code to achieve the same effect – only better, since now your "back" and "forward" buttons will work again and you can link people directly to articles within the site, should you be so inclined. Yes, I am aware that there are still a few evil amateurish <TABLE>-forced layouts and deprecated HTML tags hanging around here and there... Y'know what? I also don't care. Like it says on the front page, no one's paying me to do this, so my philosophy is "whatever gets the job done with the least amount of effort on my part." Therefore, any e-mails berating me for my lack of Total Commitment to the One True Path of CSS Purity will be cheerfully ignored.

As for new site content, the following sections have been updated:

There is now a "site news" block on the main page, to give an at-a-glance summary of what's been updated (if anything) recently. ('Course, you already knew that, or you wouldn't be reading this.)

Both the "Hardware Hacking" and "Unfortunate Food" sections have been given a significant makeover.

There are some new links on the "Links" page; a couple of new webcomics, and a new category containing some links to classic arcade-gaming resources.

The saga of "Windows GenesisXP64", as recently translated from Service Pack 4 of the Dead [CTRL]-C Scrolls, has been added to the "Ephemera" section.

A page devoted to finding and preserving the microwave directions for Hamburger Helper, which General Mills has been removing from the boxes ever since they rolled out that nasty "Microwave Singles" version, can also be found in the "Ephemera" section.

The Classic Arcade section has been renovated and expanded into the Game Room, with separate sections for full-size arcade games, home-console games, and vintage LED/LCD handhelds! Note that not all of the sections are fully active yet; most of the full-size arcade-game stuff is back up, but the console and handheld areas are still under construction.