Friday, December 7th, 2007
I thought I had this whole blog thing figured out, but then Lorelle had to do a series on “blog focus.” I tried to ignore it, but the challenge of it kept bouncing around in my head: what am I passionate enough about to focus on as a single blog topic? I ended up with a few ideas, but the one that really resonated, the one that feels like I’ve had it my whole life, is my obsession with future technology. I’m not talking about computer tech stuff and geeky gadgets. I mean, what are the operating principles of the warp drive on Star Trek?
So I took some of my birthday money, bought a new domain name, and set up a new blog. It was an experiment, just to see. After a month-and-a-half, I feel like it’s been pretty successful. I’m excited about writing for the new blog, and, since it has a focus, I’ve been able to promote it a little bit. I’m still trying to find the right voice for it, but that’s part of the fun.
Check it out: Ultratech Memes.
As a result, this blog will suffer. I would like to keep posting here, if on a much less frequent basis. We’ll just have to see whatI have for.
Saturday, September 15th, 2007
I’ve had a sort of blog fatigue recently. I think it’s partly a result of not having anywhere near as much free time to spend on it, but it’s also because of what I had wanted my blog to be. When I first started four years ago, it was largely because I gotten one of the first camera-phones, and I wanted to post pictures from it to the web. I also posted some stuff because I thought maybe some folks would be interested in a chronicle of grad school or something; I didn’t want my blog to just another self-obsessed online journal. Clearly I was deluding myself.
Continued reading >
Wednesday, March 14th, 2007
By default, WordPress displays the name of your blog first in the HTML “title” element. That’s not good for search engines or TrackBacks because it obfuscates the title of your post or page, which is what people (and Google) are really interested. There are at least two existing plugins that address this—SEO Title Tag and Optimal Title—but it’s really not that hard to do yourself, provided you’re not afraid of a little PHP.
Continued reading >
Wednesday, February 28th, 2007
I was going to write today about how I’ve improved on my previous solution for manipulating the category URIs in WordPress, but then I came across the Top Level Categories plugin that does exactly what I’ve been trying to accomplish without all of my half-assed hackery. Moreover, it’s compatible with the Permalink Redirect plugin, which my approaches weren’t. A big thanks to the authors of these two plugins for making my life that much easier.
Sunday, January 21st, 2007
I’m planning some changes for my website for the upcoming release of WordPress 2.1. Basically, I want to start using WordPress as a content management system instead of a plain old blogging tool, and the new version can handle that a bit better than the current one, 2.0.5. But I also want to do some tricky things with where different types fo contrent are stored, and that means delving into WordPress’s internals, including its mod_rewrite rules. It took a lot of trial and error, but I finally managed to get it working.
Continued reading >