perfidy

The more attentive readers will have noticed that there have been a couple changes to the Ministry of late. Not least among them is the entirely new design. In the dark days of nearly a month ago, it was brought to our attention that there was a small problem with the comment function – readers wanting to comment were invited to type the magic word, but yet there was no word. This left many confused, hurt, and stymied. We at the Ministry are not ones for half-assed measures. (To be sure, there is a category entitled “Fake Blogging” which some might think indicative of half-assedness. They would be wrong, however – when the Ministry goofs off, we do it right and we don’t try to pass it off as real blogging.) So when we were presented this problem, we took steps.

We redesigned the entire site with a new content management system and relocated it to servers half the country away. Extreme? Perhaps. But that problem is solved. Some among you will be aware that this is the fourth incarnation of the ineffable spirit of the Ministry since it first took form almost half a decade ago. The first, proto-Ministry blog was Johnny Two-Cents, and the Ministers were Johno, Buckethead and Minister Emeritus Iron City Mike.

Here’s what it looked like – click on the picture to go to the wayback machine’s copy:

The next incarnation was the first officially-branded, Ministry of Minor Perfidy blog. We lost Minister Mike about the time of the switch, but we soon picked up a couple more – Geeklethal and the stealthy and nigh on to invisible Ross. The design was still primitive, but pMachine was about ten orders of magnitude better than blogger. Again, clicky on the picture to get taken to the wayback machine.

The third incarnation is the one most of you are most familiar with, it’s the one we had yesterday. It can still be viewed at old.perfidy.org – we didn’t want to bother importing thousands of posts, so we just mirrored the site and preserved it like a tick in amber. And so, here we are at the latest, most hip, up-to-the-minute, and generally swell version of the Ministry to date. We have eschewed the normal blog format, mostly because, well, we want to be special. Rather than scroll, scroll, scroll like most blogs, this one is click, click, click. The archives are accessible both in the nav bar above, and in the sidebar below. The two most recent substantive posts will always be displayed on the front page. If you click the “open sesame” button, it will magically reveal more links. On the left are the asides, which we plan on using for quick links to things we find interesting. They won’t show on the main page, or in the list on the right, which will show the seven most recent posts after the two on the front page. It shouldn’t take you more than two clicks to get just about anywhere on the site from the front page. And, it loads quicker than the old perfidy. We’ve loaded the last month’s posts to get you started, and click around to see what’s here. There's plenty of changes, large and small.