Are any of the photos bad choices? Keep refreshing the main page to see the various photos. (There's currently 16 of them.) Jed wasn't sure about the ones of me as a kid, for example, and I'm not sure about the one with me and Kev. Are those bad choices for the first thing people see when they come to my site? Are any of the others ugly or badly-cropped or excessively boring? Keep in mind that people won't be scrolling through these images -- they'll just see one of them when they first get to the page. If they never come back to the first page, they may never see another.
Also, for the journal entries on the top page, should we have full entries (per page above), or just excerpts? (And if excerpts, how long? Longer than the ones shown?) Keep in mind that I do mean to maintain the main journal page as it is right now, pretty much -- the top page is just meant to draw the reader into the site. Is it better to have maybe three full entries (with commenting ability and all), or just excerpts? (Many sites do the latter, but I'm not sure if I prefer it or not.)
I’ve now restored the photo-picker, so people going to that page should now see a random photo.
Re excerpts: a key issue worth mentioning is that it’s not easy to do an excerpt that retains HTML formatting. So, for example, an excerpt is going to be all one paragraph, even if the original had multiple paragraph breaks in the first few lines. (If any of y’all have good ideas on how to do an excerpt that does retain HTML tags, in PHP, without parsing the HTML, lemme know.)