So I’m not writing too much here right now, but I’m still reading.
Check out my linkblog here or subscribe to the feed here.
A few recent headlines from the linkblog:
Let’s try this again, as the folks at PollDaddy say the lolcats have cleared out of the servers now.
Jump in and check a box to rough up some unscientific numbers on who is reading this blog.
Are you a pro journalist, a j-school student, a for-the-love-of-it blogger, a programmer, or something else? If you’re catching this in an RSS reader, you’ll probably need to click through to vote.
I’ve been quietly working up a redesign for this blog at random moments a few minutes at a time. I was due to make a change — the last iteration lasted more than eight months.
You’ll find the usual bells and whistles and links down low, past a few recent posts.
I made a conscious effort to make this look a little more like a blog and a little less like a news site. And it was fun. You’ll find more posts on the homepage, which makes me happier about posting more often. We’ll see how that works out.
There are, as usual, a few unfinished bits, such as the navigation that points to about and work pages. I’ll get to that.
Is the type too small? Is anything out of place in IE6? Why are you using IE6? Stop doing that, right now.
I’m in the middle of an upgrade to WordPress 2.3, but I’m getting pulled away to other duties before I finish straightening out importing old UTW tags to the new 2.3 built-in tagging hotness.
So a few things, like tags, are broken at the moment. I’ll update later (tonight?) when I fix them.
But, hey, wouldn’t you be having more fun if you were looking at Wooster Collective, Monoscope, or Your Daily Awesome?
Yeah, I thought so.
UPDATE: Heck, that was easy. The right button is at Manage/Import, where you can import tags from several different plugins (including the all-powerful UTW) as well as the usual RSS/old blog importers. Thanks WP posse!
ANOTHER UPDATE: Progress – I’ve switched out the tag calls in single.php, index.php, and sidebar.php, leaving me with some questions about tag.php, UTW related posts, and whether or not I’ll be able to just turn UTW off. We shall see.
AND THERE’S MORE: So I’ve got UTW turned off now. I found the correct call to run the tag.php page in the files for Sandbox 1.0. And of course, now I have plans to upgrade my theme to that version, but because I can’t leave well enough alone, it will take some time and effort to work in all my little modifications. Yet another redesign is tempting… Anyway, I might still be getting a database error (post2cat, eh?) when I save this post again. I’ll find out right now. Ah! No database errors, which means the problem was in UTW and not in old Sandbox code. Good. Now I’m off to find a new Related Posts plugin. Suggestions? Nevermind. That was remarkably easy.
It’s not organized as well as I’d like, and it’s neither finished nor comprehensive, but if you can’t help but be interested in the sort of stories I wrote as a reporter (way back in 2006, mind you), there are now a few clips from the Spartan Daily and Oakland Tribune posted on my Work page.
There’s a video mixed into one story there that I overshot and Shaminder painstakingly edited down to something useful. It was shot with my Panasonic consumer-grade handycam, and I think the reasoning behind the small size had everything to do with the way College Publisher processed Quicktime videos back then. Pretty sure they have a Flash solution now.
All of the stuff I’ve posted there is pretty old at this point. I’ll try and add some links soon to projects I’ve produced on at the Sentinel, videos I’ve shot, etc.
Enjoy, critique, deride, lambaste, and most of all, build your own online portfolio showcasing your work in your choice of medium.
If you get the feeling I haven’t been writing here as much lately, you’re right.
But I’m still out here, reading everything I can get my hands on and throwing up links left and right. They’re just not always where you’re expecting them, eh?
So then, if the meager postings to Delicious you find on the right sidebar and in the usual spot aren’t satisfying your link-devouring needs, take a glance at my shared Google Reader thingie from time to time (three-month-old + keyboard shortcuts = happiness). Those also show up on my Facebook profile, along with just about everything else I do in the known online universe.
And yes, you can easily find me on Twitter and/or Pownce, if you’re into that sort of thing.
It’s not midnight here yet, or I’d be fast asleep (partying UCSC student neighbors have no effect on me when the head hits the pillow), but it’s late enough to flick the stylesheet back on.
Thanks to everyone who got naked with me.
And everyone who made amusing remarks about it on Twitter.
And to the guy who commented elsewhere talking up my design while it was … turned off. Yeah, you know who you are.
The reasoning behind it, of course, is that keeping content and presentation separated make things happen faster and cooler. And better, and stuff like that.
I forget, actually, but it’s crucial to the future of the Internets.
Moving on… actual content on Friday if you’re good…
For those of you keeping score at home, this is the sixth different design I’ve used, if we start keeping track back at Blogspot in 2005.
I’m starting to peel back the layers of plugins and turn on some new stuff, so don’t be alarmed, dear readers (both of you), if things break around here for parts of tonight and tomorrow.
So, why not go look at some cute cats instead of reading the usual hand-wringing, eh?
(Five minutes later…)
…Well that wasn’t that hard. Upgraded to WordPress 2.1. Now I need to tweak a couple file paths in the css, tweak the settings on a couple plugins, and we’ll be golden.
(Ten minutes later…)
…Fixed some css stuff. Still need to clean up what’s going on down below the fold in the last few bits. And I do appear to be missing quite a few buttons on the wysiwig editor… I blame a certain video plugin. Seems fine now, actually. Not sure what was breaking there.
More work on this in the morning. If it’s the morning where you are and things still look broken, cut me some slack, aight?
(The next morning…)
…ah, the birds chirp, bees buzz, I get called into work early, and this site looks pretty funky in IE6. I’ll see what I can do about that, um, later. For now, feel free to use a better browser. It looks right in IE7 and Firefox for everything, last I checked. Safari fixes to comment form coming, um, “later” too.
(Plugin issues…)
My Google Sitemaps plugin just threw some serious errors when I posted that last update. I deactivated it.
(Later still…)
And then there’s the search results page, which I completely forgot. I’ll get to it “soon.” It’ll end up looking like the category and tag pages. Done.
Hmm. It looks like I left the trackbacks that show up directly below the comments on a post unstyled. (That was easy enough to fix.) I’ll probably just look into rolling those right into the comments instead of showing up under a separate heading.
(Comment form fixed?)
I touched up the comment form, and it’s working in IE6, FWIW. BTW, here’s a good place to get a standalone copy of IE6 to run if you’ve already installed IE7 (good for you!), but you need to find out what all this stuff you’ve been developing looks like in an outdated browser.
So is it working in Safari?
(Playing nice with IE6)
Fine, Microsoft, I’ll be sure to set both the top and left attributes when I’m positioning things absolutely from now on, just to make sure you understand what I meant when I said absolute.
The ‘meta’ post info on the left near the title should be getting better in IE6. Still some wonkiness in the colors of a couple things. Is ‘display: block’ a problem or a solution? We’ll see. Probably just needs colors set on more attributes because it gets all confused in the cascade.
Good night.
(More fun with the comment form)
Okay, I’ve absolutely positioned the crap out of that comment form, so I’m really hoping it’s working in Safari now. Is it? I’ll find out in the morning. The margins around the submit button are pretty screwy in IE6/7.
New feature: View all comments by a reader
Just turned on this WordPress plugin and I like it. Find a post with comments, then look for the “View all posts by so-and-so” link.
Inspired by Jonathan Snook.
[UPDATE: Months later, this post is getting traffic from a Related Posts link right now, so I'll point out that I turned this plugin off pretty quickly, but it was cool, and has some obvious applications. It might be a bright idea to use it on newspaper blogs running on WordPress as a basic way to give users a little touch of a profile without forcing them to register/login.]