This weekend Urban Potato got a little facelift. When your girlfriend tells you that your web site is dull and she would actually like you to spend some time working on it, you don't take that likely. Urban Potato now sports a flashier interface and better navigation.

Under the covers it finally supports the ability to see comments and track statistics like the number of visits, the most popular sections, etc. This allows me to have a referral section after each article or blog entry. RSS is intertwined throughout, so any major site section has the ability to provide a syndication feed. I've also done a major performance pass by removing as much view state as possible and getting rid of the need for redirects.

This was my first major "upgrade" to the LiveCast kernel which runs the site. The kernel is supposed to be upgradable on the fly but there are a few wrinkles in that. I can update almost anything on the site, but the kernel is a little tricky because the code that runs the update process, well, is in the kernel. It's tough to replace code you're running.

Unfortunately, the new site isn't totally compatible with the old URL format. Anyone with links will need to update them (there is an error handler that will take you to main, but it turns out the rest of the path information is stripped off so I can't navigate you further). Anyone with an aggregator pointing at me will have to update their URL as the entry point has changed.

Urban Potato also supports PathInfo instead of queries in the URL, but it isn't generating URLs this way yet because I'm having trouble picking up the style sheet (try www.urbanpotato.net/default.aspx/document/1106 to see what I mean). I'll get that fixed shortly.

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