Since Tom wrote an update on the comment situation, let me give you a little more information.
By now maybe you've noticed the new home page design. This project was undertaken by Janet Shellenberger at the behest of Tom's scheduler, Jennifer Posada. Thanks, Janet, for your work.
Integrating the weblog into the new home page was my responsibility. I could not have done it without the assistance of Big Bad John Serrao. Thanks, John.
Since Tom's first 4000 weblog posts are not yet reintegrated into Movable Type, you cannot currently use the 'Search' feature in the sidebar to find anything before the weblog went down around the first part of this month. However, that's what Google's for.
By way of example, Tom was wondering about his appearance in Second Life. For my part, I just went to the Media Appearances page and looked it up.
Using the sidebar search only returns results back to December 9th.
I might have found out even quicker if I'd used Google site search. I see directly in result number 4 that it was October 26th, 2005 from 1130 am to 130 pm.
Why did I take you on this extended travelogue (aside from to show you that I know how to search Tom's site better than anyone ;-)? To show that, if you need to search before I get the posts reintegrated into Movable Type, you should just use Google to search Tom's whole site. The other major advantage is that you can get results from Tom's voluminous material that's on the website but not in the weblog. This is often very useful.
Therefore, I'm going to gin up a separate Search page that will include weblog search, Google site search and the Tom and friends custom search (that I came up with a few weeks back) at a minimum.
As Tom said, I'll be turning comments back on after the first of the year. In the meantime, I have turned on Trackbacks. They haven't returned near as many useful links as I've had to delete Trackback spam, but you might keep one eye open when you're reading posts, especially if some time has passed to gather links. For example, here's the most recent Trackback.
At least one person has complained about the size of the fonts on the new weblog home page. I may make them smaller, but have not decided yet. If you don't prefer this size, I encourage you to resize the text through the View Menu on your web browser or by holding down 'Control' and pressing '+' or '-' in Firefox or Explorer ('0' to return to standard size).
That's all I can think of right now. Feel free to email me with further questions. I'm not really looking for design suggestions at this time. You can put those in the comments when we turn them back on ;-)