I’ve just set up a brand new page of RSS feeds. Now you have a choice of not just the plain vanilla (no, make that a “kamikaze” Mr. Misty* from Dairy Queen) feed with everything in it, but a separate feed for every category of Blather in the known universe (if the extent of the “known universe” is this website).

Check it out!

*I’m no longer the Dairy Queen aficionado I was in my youth, but there’s one a few blocks from my house and we occasionally take the kids there in the summer. I’ve noticed this strange thing lately on the menu called “Arctic Rush.” Never having been a Mr. Misty fan myself, I didn’t notice it had disappeared from the menu, and apparently it has just been renamed. Personally I think “Arctic Rush” sounds lame… something an inferior competitor would come with. Burger King, perhaps, or McDonalds. Except then it would be the “Arctic McRush with Cheese” or something.

On my Tools page, I tout my use of jQuery, which is true (I do use it), but up to now I wasn’t actually using it on my own site. Like the unkempt barber, I was always too busy cutting everyone else’s hair and not my own. And by hair I mean websites. And by cutting I mean building. So, sort of the opposite of cutting. But (as usual) I digress.

Before, the Web 2.0-ish, AJAX-ified, buzzword*-izationalized features of my site were kind of a hodgepodge of built-in WordPress features, homebrewed JavaScript and partially-implemented and or modified plug-ins.

Now I’m trying to streamline and consolidate it all on jQuery and, when applicable, jQuery-based WordPress plugins, dropping the last vestiges of Scriptaculous and prototype.js (oh how they’ve served me well). To that end, I’ve changed my navigation menus from my own quick-and-dirty style to something jQuery-based and unnecessarily showy. (I may drop the sliding animation once it starts to annoy me, which will be in about 14 minutes.)

I’ve also finally addressed my annoyance with the less-than-amazing new gallery feature in WordPress 2.5. Granted, it’s way better than what I was using before, but I really don’t like how clicking a thumbnail loads another blog page that just contains the larger version of the photo, with the photo’s filename as the title. Yuck. But I found a nice jQuery-based lightbox plug-in that does exactly what I wanted. Now anywhere on my site where I’ve got a link directly to an image, that image loads in a lightbox layer instead of redirecting to another page or just a blank window. (And I didn’t even have to add a bunch of rel="lightbox" attributes to my old code like before! [And even better, I didn't have to take out the ones I had already added!!!!])

So… well, you are either a web designer/developer, in which case you are ever-so-slightly interested, or you’re not, and you’re not. But I am, and I am, and I am very pleased with the results so far!

And the last thing I have to say is, given my inclination to talk in circles tonight solely to amuse myself, it’s probably a good idea that I decided to spend the evening tinkering with my own site rather than working on a client’s project!

* I just love how the page I linked to notes that “This page may not work with Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.xx.” Only on a page whose URL contains both .edu and a tilde. I just installed Multiple IE in my new copy of Windows last night, so maybe I should fire up IE 3.1 and see if he’s right.

Yes, I am into Pokémon. Way more than any 34-year-old could possibly justify. At least I have a kid I can use as my excuse. But it’s getting pretty serious. First the DS video games, now the trading card game, and of course I will sometimes watch the TV show and DVDs with him.

If you know anything about Pokémon (or, for those of you over the age of 10, who don’t), you know there are a lot of them. In fact, the sheer, staggering proliferation of them seems to be the main point, or at least a shrewd marketing tactic. As a result, there’s a lot of information to know about them, and thus arose the idea of the “Pokédex,” or Pokémon Index. The Pokédex is both an element in the games and the TV show, and a tool for fans, to store and retrieve information about all of the various Pokémon.

That’s all well and good, but what I really wanted was a version that was always at my fingertips, i.e. a version that works on my iPhone. Strangely there seemed to be no iPhone-friendly Pokédex out there. I can understand why an official one wouldn’t exist, what with Nintendo’s reluctance to license their brands to other hardware manufacturers (a smart move when you consider the disaster that resulted the one and only time they tried it), and especially when you consider that the iPhone is now essentially a competitor to the Nintendo DS.

Anyway… the point of all of this is that I’ve built my own iPhone-friendly Pokédex, which I am oh-so-creatively calling the iPokédex. Don’t bother going to ipokedex.com though. (Yeah, I have no idea either.) I may eventually register a unique domain name for it (assuming I don’t get sued in the meantime), but for now you can find it here at this relatively pithy URL:

room34.com/pokemon

Enjoy!

I am pleased to announce that the new Room 34 Online Store is now officially open for business!

I’m still toying with keeping some of my designs up on Spreadshirt as well, since I like some of the shirt styles they offer that CafePress doesn’t, but CafePress simply offers a broader selection of products and a much better user interface (which is kind of sad, because it’s still not that great) for managing the store. Anyway… enough of that crap. Buy my stuff! I have some new designs posted along with my “classic” designs, and some more are on the way soon.

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 »

In my ongoing efforts to crassly monetize my website, I’ve just added a new feature that synergistically leverages Amazon.com tools to dynamically embed targeted product links within my content. (Surely someone out there has a buzzword “BINGO” by now, so I’ll write the rest of this in the voice of a normal human.)

I’m noticing some weirdness in all of this, in terms of some random phrases that are triggering links to products I’ve never heard of, along with some other things that are too arcane for me to even bother identifying, because I’m a little embarrassed that I’m so friggin’ anal that I’d even notice them.

Anyway… most of the time, I think these links are pretty accurate, and it’s a great way for you to seamlessly transition from reading my drivel to lining Jeff Bezos’s pockets, not that they’re not already overflowing. Mine aren’t, however, and if you buy things from Amazon via links on my site, Jeff might just throw a bone my way. Thanks…

Although I was relatively happy with the most recent design on this site, I just found it to be too cluttered once all of the detritus of my actual blog posts got thrown into the mix. So I’ve taken the same basic layout (including my ongoing issues with clear: both which I just haven’t had time to resolve) and stripped out most of the visual elements: I’ve replaced the pungent green gradient background with plain white; I’ve removed the light green background on the sidebar; I’ve changed the background of the nav bar to extend across the page and given it a splash of the gradient color removed from the rest of the page; etc.

It’s all a bit plain now, of course, but that’s kind of the point. However, the design will be evolving over the next few weeks as I work out a proper solution for the header area (even including, perhaps, the glorious return of the “34 photos” gimmick I was doing a year or so ago, now that I have a camera in my pocket at all times, and can snap more images of the number “34″ around the city).

I know you care!

Update: Guess what. Screwed up in Internet Explorer. Awesome. More hugs ‘n’ kisses for Ballmer. Looks like it might just be a simple z-index thing, though, so I’ll fix it once I finish running the obligatory Windows Update.