Wednesday, October 21, 2009
DEAD KEYBOARD
OF FFS. I WAS TYPING A POST WHEN MY WIRELESS KEYBOARD JUST DIED. I AM USING THE ON-SCREEN KEYBOARD THING WINDOWS FORTUNATELY HAS TO WRITE THIS. I AM USING ALL CAPS BECAUSE I AM EXTREMELY IRRITATED.
Well, I hope it’s just the batteries. The thing takes two AAA batteries which of course I don’t have, and I am not driving to the store at this hour. I only hope I can afford two little batteries; I’d really rather just get a regular wired keyboard but I don’t have the spare 20 bucks for that, if they still sell for that cheap.
Oh well, my mouse finger is getting tired. This sucks. 
I am still on the internet
I just haven’t been feeling like posting anything. I’m still trying to work out how I want the new Wordpress-ized version of my site to work, and debating whether to set the install up in the root directory of Spleenville.com or in a subfolder like everything else. I don’t know why I’m paranoid about using the root directory like that—all my other installs of stuff are in subfolders and thus won’t be interfered with—or so I hope. Anyway, all I have there now is the current index page, some older pages I need to remove because they don’t go anywhere anymore, some random images. It would, I assume, be a clean install, but I need to havev the ability to set up an .htaccess file for my clean urls. I am hoping that won’t screw with anything else; once I tried to use .htaccess for a redirect and learned not to do that. What I’m trying to say is I want my site to open at Spleenville.com instead of in a subfolder like this blog is, to simplify things. Oh well, if it doesn’t work, I know how to uninstall and set everything back the way it was.
One more thing: I’ve decided I’m not going to uninstall this site, I’m just going to leave the posts where they are, since people have linked to them from time to time. I’ll just start a brand-new blog. Yes I know I said I wouldn’t do that. (I at first wrote “saidn’t” and it occurs to me that that’s sort of a cool way to further contract English. Hmmm… files away for future scifi story reference.)
Oh, speaking of science fiction, there’s an update to Wordpress—version 2.8.5—so I updated the Library site using the handy updater Wordpress now provides. It took a while but it did work. I’ll upgrade the testing site next. I probably should have started with the testing site and left the Library site alone since once I have the new site set up I’m going to move all the stories over to it, but I’ve been having some trouble with the server those files are on (the victorysoap.us domain is on a different server than Spleenville.com) so I used the Library to test Wordpress’ upgrade function.
In final new-site-testing news, I’ve narrowed my theme choices down to a few. Here is a tentative description of how the new site will look and be laid out:
- White or at least pale background for the main text.
- Black serif font for the post/page body—the ideal setup in the style sheet will be Georgia, Times New Roman, serif.
- A prominent navigation menu for the various sections of the site. Those will tentatively be:
- “Home”—the front welcome page
- The blog
- The Library—stories will be moved here
- Photos/Artwork
- Something else, maybe a news page, a contact page, I’m not sure yet.
- A footer where most of the extra links, like login links, monthly archives, and so forth, will reside.
You notice I left out mention of a sidebar. Unless the main navigation is in the sidebar, but I’d rather have it along the top. (Note: this is where my keyboard died.)
Monday, October 19, 2009
Blog Software Change Update
Well, I have been testing a variety of CMS and blogging software both well-known and obscure (Bloo? Zomplog?) and I’ve basically settled on Wordpress. I just figured out, using a Wordpress test site I put up, how to make the default messy Wordpress tags into nice, neat tags (I had to make an .htaccess file, but it worked fortunately—and now I know that mod_rewrite is installed on my server, which is good to know), which is a big plus. I thought of installing Wordpress MU (multi-user—what Wordpress.com runs off of, but they offer it for free), but that might be overkill for just my personal site. I do want to somehow separate my site into sections but running off one install but I might do that with categories. (I still might play around with MU, but I don’t know if I have the patience.)
Another thing I had been wanting was an easier editor to write in than I thought Wordpress provided, but then I found that little “toggle full screen” button in plain site on the editor bar, along with a button that added the rest of the function tags, and now I feel like a dummy. Also Wordpress has a lot of nice plugins and seems to be the blogging platform of choice for most of the world these days. And also it is free. Did I mention it was free? Well it is. It’s free. I like Expression Engine but there are some things I want to do that only the licensed version does, and that costs $100, and it will be a lot of work to get it to do just what I want it to do and I just don’t want to spend all my time fooling with it. Maybe when I get a decent job, and have some money put away, and am settled down somewhere, I can look into the software again. (Maybe by that time they’ll have that new version of Expression Engine they’ve been working on for years and years.)
So at some point in the near future the site will be down briefly while I do the switchover. I’ll post an announcement for that day for my ten readers. As I will if the url changes, though the root of my site will always be “Spleenville.com” and the blog will always be available from there. I tentatively have an idea that I want my site to be set up this way: the main page (spleenville.com), where people will be able to access the blog, my fiction, maybe a page of my photos and art if I ever get back into that, and I don’t know what else. Anyway, feel free to take a look at the test site—I’ve set it up with a variety of themes and a theme switcher plugin (look for the list of themes in the sidebar or footer depending upon which theme is active). I’m going to be testing some other plugins as well so check back.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
News of My World
Sorry for the lack of posting! Except for hanging about Twitter I haven’t felt like saying much, for a variety of reasons. One of them is I’m down in the dumps because it’s the most! wonderful time! of the month again, when my brain, such as it is, becomes a gray lump. Another reason is I’ve gotten more and more exasperated with the limitations of this install of Expression Engine that I’m using to run my blog. It’s the Core version, which is free, but there are things the complete version does that I am beginning to want and need! And there is so much free software out there (cough Wordpress cough) that does a lot of things right out of the box that I would need to build from scratch on EE. And most of all, EE costs a lot of money for someone who is unemployed and flat broke, whereas Wordpress is free free free. So if the site goes down for a moment (hours, days) it’s because I’ve decided to switch over, the Wordpress or something else but it will probably be Wordpress. I’m still doing some research into other blogging/CMS platforms though, so that won’t happen for a while yet. Don’t worry, the main blog will still be at this url, so you won’t have to change anything in your blogrolls.
That being said… on the other hand, I find Wordpress still has some quirks that irritate me. Most of them have to do with the admin screen, the “Dashboard.” They used to have a nice, clean interface with a nice big post entry area. But now you start out with an interface crowded with what I call “junk,” most of which you can fortunately remove, but still. And the posting textbox is rather small, unless you change the interface from two columns to one—but then it just sort of spreads out, and everything else is a long scroll to the bottom. It would also be nice if the rich text buttons would load faster. In the widget area it can be a bit of a struggle to drag buttons hither and yon, especially if you have a small monitor so that you’re scrolling a lot. On the other hand, the Dashboard looks nice.
I am even thinking of importing all my blog posts from all my blogs into this blog. It could be done. Of course, all the links would probably be dead—but most of them are dead now. Which reminds me of an article I read recently about the problem with the internet being the way links eventually get cacked. They just degrade, because people don’t pay for their domain names (hi there), or servers die (yeah, that’s happened to me too), files get deleted, articles get put behind subscription walls… stuff happens. I just thought now that the solution might be some sort of individual label that was attached to each item people upload to the internet that was permanently part of that article or image or whatever, and that some sort of universal tracking system could therefore be able to find that item no matter where it moves to. But I don’t have the programming knowledge to know how to do this or even if it could be done. And how to make it safe from hackers.
Speaking of hackers and other annoying web things… I already need to update my “Guide For Being Allowed To Follow Me On Twitter.” I blocked, though I did not report as spam, the following:
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Generation Empty
Okay, today’s Slap ‘Em Silly treatment is this article from way back in January that I came upon. It’s—Well, let’s just say I haven’t come on this much smug self-regard since the last time I unwisely clicked on a link that led me to something with “manifesto” in the title. I don’t know why I do things like this. Things with “manifesto” in the title rarely fail to cause me irritation. Anyway, I haven’t given anyone a real good fisking in a while. It is time.
No Just No • Trapped In The Mirror Universe • Permalink
Guidelines for my future Twitter followers
I got one of those ambiguous “So-and-so is following you on Twitter!” messages in my email today. I always check out the profiles of new followers, and this one was one of those Twitter sites that don’t seem to have an aim or purpose. (Believe it or not, some do, even mine nowadays.) The guy is apparently from the Philippines, but he doesn’t seem to do anything or link to anyone, and his “tweets” (ugh, hate that term already) are cryptic and seem pointless. The url in his profile does not exist. However, his icon wasn’t someone’s tattooed arse or a naked underage Thai girl and there weren’t any come-ons for “Asian sexxxy flirts!” forums so I didn’t block him. Instead, I messaged him asking him who he was and why he chose me to follow. I wonder if I’ll get a reply.
Still, I find it just a little exasperating that anyone and sundry can just “follow” you and you can’t find anything out about them so I have decided to compose some rules for any future Twitter followers. This is of course a quick list; I may think of more later. (And this does not touch upon my rules for getting me to follow you. Those wait for a future time.) Here they are:
Political Party Web Page Design, Part 2
I decided that since I’ve made fun of the way the new Republican Party website looks, I should be fair and take a look at the sites for other political parties to see how bad they are. (I’m going to avoid the fringe parties and just focus on the major ones.) The first one I’ll look at is the Democratic Party website. Now their website is much cleaner looking and much better organized while keeping to current web standards and fashions. It also loads fast, and doesn’t present you with all sorts of flashy graphics and videos. It even looks more patriotic—the background is a nice stars-on-pale-blue, and the red color comes in when you mouseover the menu buttons and just a few touches here and there, which is just enough red. That’s so much better than that in-your-face “we represent the ‘red’ states” scarlet brand which makes the RNC site actually painful to look at. Red can be a dominant color on a website, but it has to be used a certain way—it’s so loud in itself, for one thing, that a major-red site should have few other graphics, animations, and so on. Most of the websites on this page follow that rule and are better for it. Anyway, though the Democratic Party site has blue as its background color it doesn’t have blue all over the place, so you aren’t having the Blue State vs. Red State thing shoved in your face. The RNC site is just too loud and pushy, and that makes them look divisive. I can understand the Republicans wanting to have the same functions that the Democratic site has (they more or less seem to have the same setup when it comes to sections and functionality) without looking like a clone, but it just looks like whoever was in charge of the design asked for “like the Dem site, only bigger and louder!” Not good.
Since this is a two-party system, the rest of our political parties aren’t exactly powerful. Still, they exist. What of their websites? Let’s take a look:
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Twisted truth and half the news
I should have known Rick Sanchez was involved in the whole “Rush said this list of racist things!” lie-fest. Anyone who lived in Miami in the 80s and 90s knew who Rick Sanchez was. In short, he was a scum-sucking, bottom-feeding, if-it-bleeds-I’m-gettin’-my-cryin’-face-in-front-of-it fuckup when he was on the local news, and he’s still the same ball of rancid, smug, self-regarding assholery now that he’s a big deal on cable teevee news. It really is true that grease rises to the top, but when it comes to cookery it gets tossed out; in the professional news media it just gets promoted and promoted.
Some appropriate songs below the fold:
Well, I wonder what caused this?
Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again.”
Update; they’re back now. Odd.
This strikes me as misconceived
The GOP recently redesigned their website. So many things are wrong with the new design, but what I noticed most was how much it looks like the flag of Communist China. I’m not crazy—here is a comparison of the two:
Their header graphic, which I nicked (click for a larger image):
And this is a photo of Red China’s flag (click for full size):
I almost thought the site was a parody, but it’s apparently authentic.
Anyway, it’s not that I haven’t had the urge to post, it’s that I can’t seem to get myself worked up to post anything here. I had set up this site on Posterous, just because it’s free and I wanted to see what they offered. Then I got a couple of emails saying people were following me, and I hate letting anyone down, so I wrote something. Here it is. I guess I’ll have to keep on updating the site from time to time. But a Posterous blog is easy to set up and use, any of you people who want a blog without having to go to a lot of trouble.
Update, October 18: I’m going to close comments on this one. It’s getting spam.
Just Bizarre • No Just No • Trapped In The Mirror Universe • Permalink
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Wimpy flu, and an oldie but goodie
Well, if that was the swine flu (excuse me, the “H1N1” virus—do the “H” and the “N” in that stand for “Hate Not (Muslims Who Can’t Stand To Remember Pigs Exist”?)) then it was the wimpiest flu ever. I already feel 99% back to normal. I’ve had mere colds that were worse than this. Ha, my cold beat up your flu. Anyway.
I’m actually going to try to get a few things accomplished today, so I probably won’t be posting much until later. In the meantime, enjoy this old post of mine from 2005. I happened across it while doing something else (I don’t really sit reading my old web writings from years ago all the time, really I don’t), and thought it was amusing in light of the fact that nowadays we are supposedly under the more-enlightened, “reality-based,” totally non-racist and non-stereotyping care of progressive liberal Democrats. Or as Florence King put it in one of her essays, “The Victorian ideal of the woman as Angel of the House lives on in the black hearts of liberal men.” Snicker.
Update: a couple of links in that post are broken because of a site crash-and-move. Oops. Here is the link to the post about the guy who threatened me (in the usual passive-aggressive beta male way of too many male bloggers), and here is the post where I finally banned Patterico (!) for telling me I can’t take a “joke.” I apparently had a much shorter fuse then than I do now, but really, 1) don’t tell me not to take threats to my person seriously, and 2) don’t defend weak betas who don’t have the courage to own their own gaffes. Xlrq wanted to have his cake and eat it too—he wanted to be able to act the Big Mister Man and say “Will no one relieve me of this troublesome blogger!” but also be able to say for his less robust readers “Heeeyyy, it was just a joke! Lighten up, Francis! I din’ mean nuthin’! Chicks, they get all upset…” Remember the old Chinese saying, “He who tries to sit on two stools sprains groin.”
Ah, the old days when I’d get into internet scrims and lay down the banhammer left and right. Good times, good times…
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Urrrggghhhhh
Well, I had hoped to avoid this, but I should have been warned by my recent bout of Mystery Gut Problems. My friend has been sick with some sort of virus (probably not swine flu, since the symptoms aren’t that severe), and this morning I woke up feeling just fine… until I got up and sat in front of the computer. It was then I realized I was very, very tired—unusually so, since I had had a good night’s sleep for once. But my appetite is still okay, so I made myself a tomato, onion, garlic, and spinach salad. (I had been craving tomatoes since the day before, so I went to the store and got some. I want more—they’re cheap, and good—the tomatoes up here in Virginia so far have been way more delicious than any Florida tomato I’ve ever eaten.) The cat is in the other room for some reason…
I feel a bit better, though still rather tired. And on a good note, I weighed myself this morning and I have gone down to 172 pounds. That makes it 23 pounds I’ve lost since I moved up here. And that’s despite eating potatoes over the past couple of days—I just haven’t been consuming mass quantities like I used to. Anyway, here’s my weight loss plan: eat normal amounts of food (that means small amounts to most Americans, but you really shouldn’t eat a giant serving bowl of pasta on your own, you know), fill up with salad, not bread, avoid snacks between meals (yeah, grandma was right), avoid sweet things like candy and ice cream and cookies—you really don’t need them, and you shouldn’t be “comforting” yourself with food anyway; go for a walk, or read a book—stop eating when your hunger goes away, not when you’ve “cleaned your plate” (American plates these days are too big and full), avoid fast food—or if you must go to McDonald’s, just get one hamburger and a small fries—and don’t live in Florida.
Also, I’m having a bit of a fundraiser. I’m waiting for the county school system to finish processing my application for substitute teaching, and then I have to wait for the school to call me to fill in, and then it takes (so my teacher friend informs me) about a month after that to actually get paid. In the meantime I’m very nearly flat broke, and would sure like to pay for things, like… well, more tomatoes, maybe some chicken broth—hey, and this informative and popular website! And my cat—she needs food, and the more weight I lose, the less flesh there will be for her to gnaw on in desperate times. Someone think of the cat! Anyway, the easiest way to get those spare dollars and cents to me is by clicking on that Paypal button over there in the side menu.
Updated: I just have had it with squinting at tiny gray type. This is not a full redesign by any means, but I’ve embiggened the font slightly and expanded the paragraph line-eight just a little, and set the font color to black instead of the shade of gray it was. Hopefully it will be easier on everyone’s eyes.
Update 2: Or it could be swine flu—my friend just informed me that one of the main symptoms is fatigue. Also that it’s not really a very strong flu—which is good, I had a bad bout of flu when I was in high school and I missed a week of school. Things like going to the bathroom, which was across our small house, involved pauses where I had to rest by lying down on the floor. Fun! Anyway, so far I don’t feel quite that bad.
Friday, October 09, 2009
Stuff I’ve been doing
Well, in between washing the cat and trying to catch and destroy all her fleas, and getting over some gut-virus or whatever it was, I’ve been attempting to redesign the site. The basic goals are: a very simple design that focuses on the text; a larger, readable font; a completely fluid layout so you can see it on just about any browser and resize text as large as you want without the page running off-screen and the horizontal scrollbar showing up. Here’s the test site I’ve set up—it’s basically a copy of the main site, though right now I only have the index page set up to look right using the test style sheet. That style sheet and layout, by the way, is hacked from the one from this article. As you can see it’s still very bare-bones, and I’ll be playing around with the text styling (I liked the initial caps in the entries of the theme I use on my Library Wordpress site) and colors and so on. The background will remain white or at the very most a pale color, and the text will be dark. The link colors may change—I don’t know if I want to go with this cool color palette, or a warmer one. I will pick whatever is easiest for a wide variety of people to see. Let me know what you think so far.
Also coming up in the near future, perhaps—I may move all my stories over to my Expression Engine install, if I can set up a separate template group with its own categories with entries that can be arranged in ascending order (oldest first, so I can do chapters). I have been playing with Drupal for my novel but so far I’ve been disappointed; you can set up a “book” with ascending order chapters but the program is kind of wonky and the themes for it are mostly rather ugly or just too bloggy for what I want to do.
Okay, back to staring at code and being confused.
I woke up this morning, my head was so bad
This is the worst hangover that I ever had…
Not really, but when I woke up and my friend told me this news I, like Kathy, at first thought it had to be a joke—an Onion article, or something. But it’s twue, it’s twue! Porcelain unicorns across the land are getting bathed in tears of joy! Just ignore that war we’re still fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq behind the curtain…
Added: the Volokh Conspiracy is starting a Top Ten Reasons Obama Won The Peace Prize list.
Added again: commentary on Ace of Spades.
And again: Tim Blair wonders, what for?
And one more time: how could I forget the Beer Summit? Of course, now it’s all clear. Those Scandis do love a good beer.
Just Bizarre • Trapped In The Mirror Universe • Permalink
Thursday, October 08, 2009
At Least Our Children Is Learning!
I’m so glad we voted in an intelligent, eloquent president after eight years of that dummy Bush!
As the world celebrates International Day of non-violence, US President Barack Obama on Thursday said America has its “roots in the India of Mahatma Gandhi.”
He goes on to qualify it as “the America of today” but that still doesn’t wash. No, Mr. Obama, as much as you’d like to give credit for everything on Earth to someone, anyone else, I’m afraid that the roots of “the America of today,” and the philosophies of Martin Luther King and Gandhi, all stem from that northern European phenomenon known as Western Culture, which was in turn spawned by the Middle-Eastern religion known as Christianity, not Islam. What did they teach Obama in that fancy Hawaiian private school—Surfing 101? Advanced Hula Dancing?
We have three more years of this? My head hurts.
(Via Hot Air and Kathy Shaidle.)
No Just No • Trapped In The Mirror Universe • Permalink
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