Harken back to the days of yore, when we all kept our NCSA Mosaic “hotlists” up to date with our latest favorite links. Come to think of it, a blogroll (a term that is quickly becoming just as antiquated) is no different. But since I generally keep my sidebar link lists (a.k.a. the “blogroll”) limited to top-level pages of sites in which I have a broad interest, but these items are specific sub-pages or blog posts, I am just going to list them out here for my own future reference, and yours.

First up we have a cool coffee mug for type aficionados, and it even ties in with the excellent Helvetica documentary.

Next, some Useful WordPress Tricks… the title says it all.

And then we have… well, actually that’s all we have for right now, but if I think of, or stumble upon, anything else pertinent and/or interesting before the stroke of midnight, I’ll just add it here.

I was beyond dismayed tonight to load up my browser and discover that my website, for whatever reason, just wasn’t working. Firefox would just bring up a completely blank screen. Safari returned a strange error:

Safari can’t open the page “http://room34.com/”. The error was: “Operation could not be completed. (kCFErrorDomainCFNetwork error 302.)” (kCFErrorDomainCFNetwork:302) Please choose Report Bugs to Apple from the Safari menu, note the error number, and describe what you did before you saw this message.

Uhh… OK.

Needless to say, it’s not something I’ve ever seen before, and if Google is any indication, (almost) no one else has either.

After inspecting my files and my data tables to see if anything had been altered (i.e. hacked — and no, it hadn’t), and watching The Colbert Report, I decided I had no choice but to confront the rat king and start stepping through all of the nested include files that comprise the WordPress application, hoping to find the exact point at which the whole thing was going kerblooey. Read more »

What’s even more extremely current than “bleeding edge”? Well, whatever it is, I’m not it. But I still try to keep my software as current as possible, and that includes updating WordPress whenever a new version is out. Most of the time, the difference is negligible, of course. Other than the major transformation of the admin interface with WordPress 2.5, very little actually changes as far as your site appears to the outside world. Which is good, for the most part, because you don’t really want unexpected changes on your site just because the underlying software is changed. It should all keep working just like it did before. Read more »

I knew it was probably coming, so it wasn’t a total shock. But still… I woke up this morning to this:

Ugh. It will most likely have melted by noon, I suppose. Not that that will do much to repair my severely damaged psychological state.

Even worse, I’m annoyed that the default CSS for the new WordPress gallery functionality uses float: left so when there are only two images, it doesn’t center them, but leaves a nice, perfectly-sized void where a third photo would have gone. I’ll have to fix that. Speaking of voids, my annoyance (and distraction) at snow and CSS is somewhat compensated for by the smooth “electronic breakbeat jazz” grooves of Revolution Void.

Update, 8:13 AM: Great, now it’s actually snowing more. Take that, global warming! (Yes, please check out that site, if for no other reason than to prove that just because your URL is “globalwarming.org” doesn’t mean you’re a benevolent non-profit trying to save the world.)

Having now set it up on a client’s site at work, and being impressed with the experience, I’ve gone ahead and upgraded this site to WordPress 2.5. The changes to the new version are mostly on the “back end” (it’s less unseemly than it… er… seems), but it does feature a built-in photo gallery feature I’m interested in trying out (no offense to the Dutch Monkey… but good riddance to the cumbersome-at-best Gallery2), even though it means the “Offspring” pages will probably be out of commission for a while as I restructure things.

I still haven’t really gotten into using WordPress widgets, and I’m sure there are a ton of other cool things I could implement if only I had the time to discover them. (Although now that I’m actually using WordPress — at least on one project — at work, the chance of me “discovering” these features and plug-ins should increase somewhat.)