Entries Tagged 'wordpress' ↓

I’m really interested in talking about Seth Godin’s blog about “High resolution mistakes”, and how concern about metrics, and drawing the Digg crowd (or blogging for popularity in general), can ruin what might otherwise be an entertaining, personal blog. I mean, if you can write, you can write, and you can find stories in your life that are interesting. Following the cookie cutter model to popular blogging means you’ll just end up with another robotic technopolisci blog among thousands. I like his list of “common metrics”, and their possible real points, but to me the crux of his article lies here:

There are literally millions of bloggers that have become so focused on measurable traffic that they end up posting nonsense designed to do nothing but attract a Digg. Look back at a blog like that a month later and it appears to be a series of gimmicks, all designed to maximize a metric that’s almost totally irrelevant to what the blogger set out to do in the first place.

I wanted to be popular once. Thankfully, these days I just want to be me.

For instance, I spend about three hours investigating different <blockquote> styles, and finally decided on using Stuart Robertson’s CSS Curly Quotes technique. Of course, once I decided to use it, it took me most of that time to get the spacing et al to work the way I wanted it to. I’m really happy with the result, though. Behold:

He is wise who knows the sources of knowledge — where it is written and where it is to be found.
- A.A. Hodge

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall, nations perish, civilizations grow old and die out, and after an era new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on, still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men’s hearts of the heart of men centuries dead.
- Clarence Day

Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.
- Virginia Woolf

Quotes provided by Useful Information.

By the by, if you’re using Internet Explorer, you’re missing the entire effect. You’re also, and perhaps more importantly, way behind the times. Don’t you know that even IE7 isn’t standards compliant!? Sure, it’s shiny and new, but try to use some blockquote:before or blockquote:after styles and you’re up virtual creek without a joystick.

That said, you should really go and download Firefox. Trust me, life’s better when you’re foxy.

I have this horrible feeling that the database the site is running on is hopelessly fubared. A lot of the older content isn’t indexing correctly, and there’s a lot of debris hanging around from my previous installations. All of which is just to say that, having finally started towards a site I find nearly optimal, I may have to take it all back to formula. At least the process is bound to be much quicker the second third fourth fifth time around.

Who knows, maybe it will right itself somehow. In the meantime, I’m playing around with sitemaps to see if that helps my indexing. Wish me luck!

There’s some small amount of joy in messing around with code until you break it, and then backtracking to figure out if there’s some other way you could make it work. Granted, I’d probably have much greater success if I had even more than the slightest idea what I’m doing. I doubt it would be quite as much fun, though.

On a more practical note, if someone could tell me how to combine the functionality of Kashou’s Inline Ajax Comments with Mike Smullin’s Ajax Comments 2.0, I’d be incredibly grateful. I fiddled plenty, but it’s not something I’m likely to figure out on my own.

WYSIWYG editors are just plain annoying. They load slow and they try to do everything for you, but they do it wrong. I mean, haven’t these people learned anything from MS Word!? The default editor has a handy link button, and will even do bold and italics for me if I become too lazy to bracket my b’s and i’s, and really, that’s all I need.

At the moment I’m hanging out, slightly buzzed off a Canadian table wine called “Cochon Mignon” (cute pig), which is actually quite good, and thinking about doing my homework for tomorrow (which I imagine I really should). Next week we have our first set of due dates, as far as assignments go. I’m not quite stressed … yet. I work best under pressure.

The new site loads much faster than the old one. I attribute part of that to the shiny new underbelly of WordPress 2.1, and some of it to my having somehow broken my old install with random plugin installations and too many bells and whistles. This install I will keep clean and limber, because I like it that it loads much faster than it used to. And really, what is a blog besides a place to put words? Of all the communication mediums, words have always been my favorite anyway, so even in this age of fancy podcasts and youtubisms, I figure they’re what I’ll stick with. I have some fun plans for some other projects, though who knows if I’ll ever follow through on them. Mostly I just get excited about having plans, so much so that I really don’t feel like doing anything about them would contribute to my excitement. I’d much rather just plan things. One of the things I always forget when moving urls around is that it breaks referral links. Mostly, this means that the handy links I got from the Librarian Avengers “Why you should fall to your knees and worship a librarian” link won’t give me all the fancy hits that it used to. Rather, it will just direct to my boring, empty (but very speedy), portal page.

Speaking of which, my portal page uses Drupal, which is itself kind of fun. It’s nice to get out there and try out some new software every now and again. I even installed it manually, since Dreamhost doesn’t have a Drupal one-click install (yes, I really am that lazy most of the time). It kind of makes me wish I was in the web design course this term, but I am glad to be getting my requirements out of the way so that I can have fun next year (I think). I also, from time to time, mourn the fact than I’m not in McNally’s history of libraries class, but I guess it’s too late to do anything about that now. I’m excited about taking his history of books and print course next year, so at least that’s something.

Alright, back to the wine, and maybe even some studying….