It’s Official! Today has been a good day. After finishing up Zeldman’s Book, I was inspired to bring my code up to the Transitional XHTML 1.0 standard.

The main reason was I simply wanted the site to work across platforms – the site looks the same in IE6, IE4, Mozilla, Camino, Safari, or Firefox. What I didn’t know is that the speed of my site would increase so much. Separating the structure from the layout makes things a lot more lightweight, and in turn, a lot less taxing on web browsers.

The easy part was working through all my old code, making sure every T was crossed and every lowercase j dotted. The hard part is still only partially done – if I really want to make the entire site totally complaint, I will have to go through all of my old posts, and make sure all of the hyperlinks are formed correctly, there are alt tags on all of my images, etc. Honestly, this is not as much of a priority to me right now, but it is something I will eventually get around to. Considering I have made over 400 posts – that’s a lot of code.

I’ve also come to the conclusion that MovableType is an awful way to manage a weblog. I haven’t had to maintain something this much since I was using windows 98. Every month or so, I catch myself repairing permissions, having the DB lose info, getting random errors, and in turn, losing content. It’s really a pain, and I’m starting to think I may switch over to another similar system, such as WordPress.

We’ll see what happens. In any event, I dare you to make your site standards-compliant.