Smoothing wrinkles
Posted on March 1, 2006
As I started composing this post in my mind, I was thinking about the phrase “ironing out some bugs.” Strange one, that. When I iron, I iron out wrinkles. If a bug of some sort crawls on the clothes I’m ironing, I flick the bug away with a finger. I don’t crush it with the iron, because it would stain the clothes. Whatever…
In 2005, I started out strong in posting to the blog. I’m pretty sure I had at least one post every month. I’ve been known to slack every so often, but I’m kind of getting back into it. I’m not taking any classes this semester, so that should leave me with more time for blogging. OTOH, I also have no life, so while I should have more time for blogging, I have found a text based Scrabble game on my computer system that’s as addictive and frustrating as Solitaire. Even though I tell myself I should be working on my blog, I often end up surfing the web or playing Scrabble. At least the Scrabble is intellectually challenging.
Getting back on topic, since I have gone over to the new WordPress and installed the different themes, I also found out that the themes aren’t quite as plug-and-play as it would seem. Each theme, including Default and Classic, requires a bit of tweaking. Some of them, it’s just a matter of installing the quotes code in the right place (I also had to modify the code for the Quotes plugin). Most of the themes will list the archives in the sidebar, but this is a bit annoying because I’ve got posts back to 2002. My solution was to make a separate Archives page, but even that wasn’t so simple.
I think there is a subtle difference in the way the various themes handle pages (as opposed to posts). Some of them will automatically put a comment box at the bottom, even though I may not want one. However, I guess I would consider them wrinkles, instead of bugs. Bugs will crash the browser, or at the very least, they won’t do what they are expected to do. Wrinkles don’t really hurt anything. They just mean the presentation isn’t quite up to par. They’re inelegant.
Other minor things:
- Adding more categories for articles. Hopefully this will make them a bit more topical. I guess a semi-long term project might be to go back and re-categorize older posts.
- Adding new links categories. As in the past, I plan on posting those on a separate page, although I might try to create a hack to show blog links on the main page, or maybe work on showing random links categories.
- I plan on making a separate “page” for the gallery/portfolio. In WordPress, a “page” is like a post that is outside of the normal chronology of the blog. It’s meant to be accessed from the main page and it’s always there. I also plan on a downloads page, though after the gallery. I might also create pages for tutorials, a guestbook and/or a wiki. The last few are just ideas at the moment, with no firm plans.
- Technorati is something like a search engine and index for blogs. People type in certain words and Technorati looks for them on various blogs. I don’t know if it searches full text, but I do know it searches and indexes by keywords. For most blogs, it does this by category. In other words, when I post this, WordPress will automatically send a ping to several sites, one of them being Technorati. When somebody does a search for journal, school, or WordPress, this post should appear in the results because those are the categories I placed this post in. However, in some blog software, they take the idea a step further and have Technorati “tags”. I might be wrong on this, but from what I understand, the idea is that categories are supposed to be general, while the tags are supposed to be more specific. I could put something in the School category, but tag it as IUPUI, or CSU, or Japanese class, or whatever. WordPress has this feature as a plugin, but I haven’t downloaded it yet.
Anyway, It’s some stuff I have to work out. Nothing major, but will still take time.
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