Category: Site Updates

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When I set up a B2 site just for kicks in 2002, I didn’t really expect to still be posting to it ten years later.

Admittedly, I don’t post as often as I used to, and I think fewer people read it than did back in the day — partly because a lot of my more fannish stuff has moved over to Speed Force, partly because I don’t post as often, and partly because of the changes in the social media landscape, most notably Facebook and Twitter.

Vital stats:

2644 posts
3847 comments

Top 10 posts viewed over the past year:

  1. Setting up a Wireless Network on Linux: Ralink 3062 and Network Manager
  2. Comic Con! (2003)
  3. Getting Flash to work on Google Chrome for 64-bit Linux
  4. Songs Not to Play at a Wedding
  5. Victimized Hero
  6. Avocado’s Number
  7. Super-hero Weaknesses
  8. Flash Foreshadowing
  9. Fuchsia Zoom
  10. How to Get Rid of Windows Live Messenger

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After years of piggybacking on employers’ web servers (with permission, of course!), I’ve moved my personal websites to a third-party web host. It’s kind of weird to be dealing with a web server that I don’t fully control, but DreamHost is really flexible and (most importantly) specifically supports WordPress.

The only thing I’ve really missed so far is Apache’s mod_speling [sic], which will automatically correct any one typo or capitalization error when trying to reach a file. It’s nice to have, but far from critical.

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Cool! I’ve been named in The Comics Reporter’s reader poll on Name Five Writers About Comics You Like That Aren’t On CR’s Home Team Of Tom Spurgeon And Bart Beaty. It’s an impressive list, and with some of the big names on it, almost intimidating to be included.

If you’re visiting here for the first time, let me make a bit of an introduction. This is my sort of general-purpose blog, where I write about anything from comics and science-fiction to photos, life observations and technology. If you’ve dropped in from The Comics Reporter, you’ll probably be most interested in:

Thanks to Richard Pachter for recommending me!

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WordPress has been making a big deal out of their new default theme, Twenty-Ten, released with WordPress 3.0. Meanwhile, I’ve been watching this site get more and more cluttered, and I keep having to tweak the existing theme to be able to deal with new WordPress features like nested comments, custom menus, etc.

Last week I had to replace the theme’s comment form (fortunately with something simpler) because it didn’t interact quite right with WordPress 3.0.

What the heck. I haven’t changed the look since 2007, so I might as well give it a shot.

I’ve switched over to Twenty-Ten, using one of my own photos for the banner. It’s a view from Modjeska Grade Road, taken last January.

Modjeska Grade View

I’m not quite happy with it yet, but I’m not sure what I want to do next.

My main goals for the new layout are:

  • Move the last of the customizations out of the theme and into plugins (so that I can easily switch to another theme if I want to).
  • Keep the new page uncluttered and relatively fast-loading (which is why I haven’t added everything back to the sidebar).

I have had to make a couple of adjustments to the theme itself. Twenty-Ten insists on showing excerpts instead of complete posts for archives, categories and searches, so I had to go in and modify that. I also added a couple of bits to the stylesheet: alternating comment backgrounds, tweaks to the old Twitter digests, etc. Still, I’m making a point of keeping those changes minimal and grouped together.

I’m also trying out WP-Minify, which should make scripts and styles load a lot faster, or at least the ones hosted locally. Unfortunately there are still a lot of remote scripts for things like Google Analytics, the Share This buttons, and the Link Within thumbnails. Some of them might work. I’ll have to experiment.

So, things are in a bit of flux. Please let me know if you find something that doesn’t work, or miss something that used to be here, by doing one of the following:

  • Leave a comment on this post.
  • Use the contact form.
  • Email me at kelson – at – pobox – dot – com.

Thanks!

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I’ve deleted redundant or trivial items, split some digests by topic, tagged, categorized and titled the rest, fixed typos and expanded abbreviations, reformatted quotes, links and lists, imported photos, and more…all in an attempt to make the archive a little more useful.

After trying to unify some of the more eclectic mixes of unrelated one-line remarks and links, I’ve decided it’s time to stop automatically importing “tweets” to the blog. Sure, the digests maintain quantity, but I think it’ll be better to keep the quality up instead. What makes a good status update doesn’t always make a good blog entry, and I’d frequently find myself either staying up late to edit that day’s “Line Items” post or rewriting it the following day. (Plus I was always worried about a bug in Twitter Tools that would cause a duplicate post about 30-50% of the time.)

I think the blog will be better off if I copy, expand or skip stuff from Twitter at my own pace and put it in a more suitable format to begin with.