Sorry about that
Seems there’s a bunny gene in my posts, causing them to multiply like our fuzzy, long-eared friends are said to do. I’ll look into it.
Kudos
Made a credits page listing all the good stuff that runs this blog. Good as a resource for those curious about any such matters as well.
From the “to do”-list
I am going to add a tag system, which means tagging a hundred or so old posts… but maybe it’s worth it. Gives a better overviev, plus that Web 2.0 touch. Maybe even Web 2.1 (beta)!
Switching hosts
I have been content with paying a lot for a hosting service that takes 10 seconds to serve my WordPress dashboard. That is, when it serves anything and doesn’t just give me a blank page or a php file for download…
There may be downtime for dns changes and emergencies (I’ve never done this before, screwups may happen… :))
Update: Seems I managed that without any major problems. Never transferred anything other than plain, static html sites before, so I was a bit nervous about the whole deal with moving databases and stuff.
I decided to sign up with Dreamhost. Seems to be a good value deal, 20GB disk space and a whopping 1TB of transfer is plenty of room for a web hobbyist like myself to play around with. My old host only allowed one domain per account, but now I don’t have to invest anything but the 5-10 dollars for domain registration when I want to try something out. And I have an idea or two.
Revisioning (now in action)
Decided to roll out the new version of the design. Mostly changes to the sidebar, and it’s not done in whole, but I feel things I do never get completely done. I think it’s part of my creative process. If it’s perfect, then there would be nothing left to inspire me for a new project. Still, I think it’s an improvement over the last version (see the image below for comparsion). Feel free to give your opinions and suggestions. :)
For those interested in what’s going on under the hood, I have to mention the moo.fx javascript library. A very nice, lightweight pack for effects (like the collapsible sidebar elements).
Revisioning
Oh, and this sidebar – and a load of other details things in this design – looks hideous. Compared to the updated version I’m piecing together. What was I thinking?
The big sell-out, haha
I signed up for Google AdSense. More out of curiousity than of any illusions that it will make me loads of money. Let’s see how it works out.
Newflesh.net… beta 2… or something.
So, I finally got rid of the old theme. I never really liked it all, just something I whipped together to get it a bit more personal. This time I think I’m at least halfway to being satisfied. The background image is under consideration, though. Maybe turned out too gritty.
It’s not much left of it visually, but since I’m not completely able to get the php-y bits to fit together with the xhtml-y and css-ish ones I have to mention that it started with oriol‘s Qwilm! theme, and not only does it deserve credit for being my starting point but also for being a great theme in itself.
I also decided to add a sideblog, powered by a plugin written by Kates Gasis. Very easy to use, and hooks right onto your sidebar if you have a widgetized theme. I think that adding the sideblog will increase posting, since I often feel some things, like links that only deserve a sentence-long description look too small among the “big” posts.
And in case someone likes the design, I may make a downloadable “vanilla” version of it when I’ve worked out a few quirks.
More about-stuff
It’s getting close to five in the morning and I’m having a little bout with insomnia, and that usually means that I’m planted in front of the screen. But there are worse things you can do than spending the night at the pc with a nice cup of coffee.
Since I can’t come up with any real content right now, I thought I’d write a bit about the site and its creation. Maybe someone finds it interesting. Overall, I enjoyed setting the site up. Firstly, I think WordPress seems like a great piece of software. It has all the functionality I can Imagine, and then some, and is really nice to manage. I havn’t had to consult the documentation much, but there seems to be a well-organized wealth of it.
The current theme is a quite modified version of Connections from www.vanillamist.com. Not that I liked it in its original form (going to add that when I get around to adding a theme choser), but I liked the layout so it was a good starting point for me. I’m not that literate when it comes to stuff like XHTML and CSS, so I focused on images and some stylesheet tweaking.
CSS is something I got determined to learn more about after working on this design, though. Last time I made a more advanced web layout the common method was to use tables, invisible gifs to make the tables behave, and occult rituals to ensure compatibility with more than one browser. That was a while ago, and good things have happened since.
Let there be blog
…and there was blog.
Well, that was a lame opening for a first post, wasn’t it? But it poses an interesting question; “why is there blog?” I realize that some people actually have an idea about it before they create the blog, while what I had was an unused domain on a host that I’ve mostly used for feeding Thunderbird’s junkmail filter. So, this weekend the rare combination of boredom (of which I have plenty) and initiative (usually elusive) made me decide to do something about that empty space. I guess I have to find some purposes for the site along the way.
I guess one of the first things on the agenda (after making the sidebar sections less empty) is some kind of art section. It’s mostly on a wannabe basis, but art is one of the things I enjoy dabbling with when inspiration hits. More about that later.
Other than that I guess it will the usual personal blog material: things I have thought about, books I have read, records I have listened to. We’ll see about that.
