A Trifle Absurd

New Site Design

I’ve revamped the site design, changing the theme and adding standalone project pages for Trifle and Overleaf. Both of those just contain brief explanatory blurbs for now, but I hope to add more information as time goes on. I’ve also created a new about page.

The new theme is an adapted version of the Pool theme by Borja Fernandez. I changed the color scheme, removed a few images, and made various other tweaks.

A big hat tip to Lorelle VanFossen for cluing me in to the Firefox Web Developer Extension, which made those theme changes easy. Live CSS editing is a wonderful thing.

Housekeeping

If you’ve ported a Blogger blog into Wordpress, you might want to double-check the internal links between imported posts. I just had to go fix all of mine. The Wordpress importer had left them in Blogger-style “/yyyy/mm/post-title” format, rather than “/yyyy/mm/dd/post-title”.

I decided to ditch the ads in the sidebar: they caused a page-loading flicker, and were rarely relevant to the actual content. I only added them in the first place for page-view statistics, but now that I’m on a full-blown hosted account, stats are plentiful. In fact, I discovered the above broken links while perusing the server log. Web bots make great link checkers, don’t they?

Oh, it turns out I didn’t have Previous Page/Next Page links in my template, so you couldn’t read more than ten posts from a particular month. That’s fixed now, too.

Nixing Comment Spam

I haven’t had much trouble with comment spam yet, but I’d rather take preventative measures than be drowned in a flood of spam later on. So, I’ve taken a few simple steps: disabling comments on older posts, altering the comment submission URL, and disabling trackback entirely.

I’ve also added an extra field to the comment form with a blindingly obvious question to answer. I first saw that on Jeremy Zawodny’s blog, and I like it better than captchas or hashcash because it’s fully accessible and doesn’t require JavaScript.

The upside to all this is that I’ve turned off comment moderation for the time being, so comments will appear immediately. Hopefully that will last awhile before the spammers catch on.

While I’m on the subject of blog administration, I should mention that I’m going through and categorizing my previous posts. I’m spending all this time talking about tags, so I should occasionally do some actual tagging, right?

WordPress Upgrade

I just upgraded this blog from WordPress 1.2 to 1.5–the transition was just as painless as I’ve been led to expect by my consistently positive experiences with WordPress. Kudos to the WordPress team (and community) for building a great product.

More Notes on the New Site

Credit my wife Elizabeth with inspiring the color scheme of this new site. I was originally planning a simple green-and-white scheme, but she found it boring. One thing led to another, and we spent an evening trying out different colors together. Both of us like the end result a lot better than the original, and we had a lot of fun collaborating along the way.

About comments: I’m using Colin Devroe’s Optional Comment Moderation plugin. Posts less than seven days old have comments open, but older posts have comments moderated (and thus they won’t show up right away, since they’re held for my approval). I’ll probably also add a rel=”nofollow” plugin soon.

Tomorrow I’ll get back to something less self-referential than the design of my blog, I promise…

New Site

Well, it’s done, or done enough, at least. This is the new home of my blog, and thanks to WordPress, it enjoys a host of new features that the old one didn’t: comments, trackbacks, and search, to name a few.

All of the posts from my old blogspot site have been copied over, and the transition was in general surprisingly easy. Of course, then I had to complicate things by insisting on building my own WordPress template. Still, WordPress has been really good to me so far–it’s done everything I’ve needed, and with a minimum of fuss.