The flurry of updates continues. I've made a new theme for Barnyard, in regard to the impending July 4th holiday. I call it "Independence". It's a flag theme for the site. It's currently available as an alternate; but I'll set it as the primary someday soon.

I've also written some XML versions of my blog. I've got a nice interface into the Presstopia database; which certainly helps.

Also, I've made a great discovery. Before I get to the discovery, let me explain why it's so great...

In the beginning, there was darkness. Next came light. Now there are these things called websites. In the old days, you simply copied your work to a remote computer to "publish" your site. These days, things aren't quite as simple.

For starters, Barnyard BBS consists of several thousand files. It takes a long time to publish, even with broadband. I don't want to publish the whole thing when I make revisions. Also, information contained within Barnyard BBS is dynamic. Things change in the live version (such as blog posts, family tree, etc.). If I were to just "copy over", I would lose this information.

I've worked with FrontPage in the past, and I use Visual Web Developer today. Both of them have a sort of synchronization feature that is helpful. However, the both have "fragile" indicies for this synchronization. Each product needs to fully "publish" every file at least once. This is a pain-in-the-ass with a big site. It also breaks easily (if you move your local copy, the syncronization information is lost).

Back to the great discovery. I've found a program called SyncBack. It allows all sorts of custom synchronization between locations. It can do local drives, network storage, or even FTP locations. It's very handy. I can synchronize by publishing selectively. I can also grab modified items from the remote site (for example, the blog database). Excellent program. Very configurable. The even offer a free version. I highly recommend it. It's somewhat like an enhanced RoboCopy, which is in turn an enhanced XCopy.