… to a TANcast near you (“near” in a virtual sense, unless you live in the Greater Los Angeles Area, the San Francisco Bay Area, or Metro Atlanta, in which case “near” also applies physically):

• WordPress 2.7, giving us lots of new features like easy implementation of sticky posts (the latest TANcast will always be the first thing you see on the site), a new admin interface with better comment handling, the ability for you all to reply directly to comments (threading), and more.

Probably coming soonish (almost certainly at the same time as the upgrade):

• Replacement of the existing podcasting solution with a new one that is actually being maintained by the creator.  We’ll get better stats tracking and a slightly nicer audio player that might eventually be replaced again with an even nicer one.  This still needs work on my end, especially since the change in backend means I’ll get to manually update almost 30 existing entries to use the new system and new media player.

Coming a little less soonish (delayed for the same reason TANcast was late this week: Andy lost a weekend):

• The much-promised visual overhaul of the site.  I’ve trying to figure out how to hack in things like keeping the latest Podcast at the top, but the new WP version might do a good enough job by itself.  Yay!  Still working on making images and working out the PHP code and learning CSS and trying not to make it all look like ass.

Possibly coming, but even less soonish:

• A new-hotness comment system leveraging IntenseDebate (recently acquired by Automattic, the company that makes our blogging software and our anti-spam solution, and which previously acquired Gravatar) to add even more comment features beyond jut threading (like optional cross-posting of your comments to Twitter).  The main concern about rolling this out is that it appears (for the moment) that we might not be able to do some clever things, like highlight comments made by Tim, Andy, or Noah (egotists that they are), that are planned in the new theme.

With a lot of luck (upgrading to WordPress 2.5 broke the podcast uploads for a few days) this will go smoothly and you will see posts break, then get fixed one at a time over the course of a Saturday morning.  Due to holiday travel and the slow rate of updates to WordPress plugins we use, we might take this first step in any of the next 3 weekends.