Thanks to PHP & SimpleXML, the main Avarthrel site now has a side bar with a site map. I just got a massive deja vu feeling - and yes, turns out it's not the first time I've written a side bar implementation. My Neverwinter Nights site had such a sidebar too, but it wasn't XML-based - it was raw included PHP4 code from... God knows when. Well, at least it still works. It appears I have utterly destroyed (save for the copies buried deep in Subversion) the Common Lisp -based madness.

As far as the Avarthrel website redesign goes, I've got to say I have a giant job ahead, because I'm not a Visual Guy. Yesterday, I told my friend that I have something specific in mind about the site's new design: "a bastard child of Thief: The Circle, T2X site, and Elfwood story pages". How interesting and original it turns out remains to be seen, but one thing is sure - it'll probably look much better than what's out there now.

Also, I started using rsync to push changes to the Avarthrel site. Since I have different configuration files for the development box and the webhost, and there's stuff I don't want on the webhost anyway (such as .svn directories), I can't push the files right on, and I've always used scp. But now, with a little bit of --exclude and --dry-run, it turns out updating stuff with rsync is actually pretty easy!