Yeah, got tired of the black emo-esque theme, so I’m back to the white background (You RSS readers should launch up the ol’ browser and take a look). I really like it so far. The WideJournal theme from BlogoSquare builds upon Sandbox from plaintxt.org, plus it incorporates the rotating header image thing which I like. The images you currently see aren’t mine, but I’ll upload a few of my own soonish.
Category Archives: Site stuff
CSS adventures
Every time I redesign this blog, I am amazed at the lack of CSS knowledge I have. Or is that “horrified”? Either or, I know I have a lot to learn. I spent an ungodly amount of time trying to reconfigure this 3-column blog into the way I wanted it — content on far left, two sidebars on the right. And I ended up slapping a “position:absolute” on the left sidebar in order for the content to stick finally. I don’t know — it’s probably not a very elegant solution. But hey, it works for now. As for the rest of this blog, they’ll have to wait until I get home…
And yes, I’ll actually blog about something other than my own site in the near future
Top 3 incoming links
My top 3 incoming links for today are as follows:
1. From the Valleywag blogger dinner entry.
2. From some stupid splog.
3. From the movabletype.org Donors page. (Yes, I was once a loyal paying customer of Movable Type).
It’s kinda funny. Especially the donor list, which must’ve been updated recently, because I don’t think I’ve ever gotten any hits off that thing until now.
Burn that feed
I’m jumping on the feedburner bandwagon. If you want my Flickr photos, del.cio.us links, and blog entries, all in one fantabulous feed, please subscribe to my Feedburner feed.
Huzzah for feed integration!
Minor site updates
For those that care about that sorta thing, here’s a list of minor updates to this blog (Beware: Mid-level of gobbledegook blog jargon ahead):
- Changed my static pages (About, Links, Published, and Résumé, respectively) to look a little different from the rest of the regular blog entries. This basically meant creating a separate Pages Template for them, removing the extraneous stuff like titles, dates, comments, etc. I had to create a separate Links template though, because the regular Pages interface on WordPress can’t handle PHP (ie. I couldn’t use the get_links_list function otherwise). I still have to format that Links page properly though — my list is getting out-of-hand.
- I cleaned up the sidebar. Archives are now in drop-down menu format (full details on how to do so are at the WordPress Codex), links were all transferred to the aforementioned Links page (though I may add a “most recently updated blogs” list later), and added my Upcoming.org schedule for kicks (Using this handy-dandy Feed to Javascript wizard. I tried using a plugin solution, but that didn’t work out too well).
- As for the iTunes-is-playing thing, that was done via the WP-iTunes plugin. I use RecentTunes to upload my iTunes information to the site. I downloaded and installed the plugin, entered an iTunes key variable (just made something up), entered my Amazon.com dev token (for the album images), and activated it. Then I configured RecentTunes as follows:
- under the Upload tab, I selected HTTP GET, and entered this site’s URL.
- then under Templates, in Get Args, I typed in something like this:wpitunes=$itunes_key_var&track=^t&artist=^p&album=^a&genre=^g, with the “$itunes_key_var” being the key variable that I selected. - Added Technorati tag functionality to my blog entries via the Bunny’s Technorati Tags WordPress plugin.
If any of that was unclear, and you want to do any of the above yourself, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll try to help.
Anyway, yeah, not that much of an update really. But still wanted to chronicle it in case I forget how I did any of this stuff.