I'm pleased to unveil The Silicon Underground, Version 5.0. I'd still like to do some design work and a little more tweaking here and there, but now that we've reached the point where what we have now is better than anything we've had before, it's time to throw the switch.

Design. The default layout is CSS-based. Some people don't like CSS, because Internet Explorer won't resize text on pages that use CSS. You can pick "clean," a layout that doesn't use CSS, from the menu at the top left. It's about double the size of the CSS-based layout but will render well in browsers that have issues with CSS.

Click one link, and the site stores your preference.

Over time, I will probably introduce new templates. The two I have now are pretty generic; I literally dropped my old logo into existing templates and made just one or two other changes.

Filtering. Maybe you just come here for the computer-related entries and couldn't care less about what I write about toy trains. Or vice-versa. You can selectively indicate which story categories you want to ignore, and the site will remember your preference.

Search. The search functions on the previous software I was using (b2) were nice at first, but once I had several hundred entries in the site, it started getting less and less useful. This search engine allows you to limit your searches within a topic and to perform three types of search: exact phrase, all words, and any words.

Speed. While the uplink speed of my DSL line is still a limiting factor, now it's the biggest limiting factor. The database search now accounts for about 10% of the time you spend waiting for the page. Previously it was more than half.

I hope you enjoy it.