erudity.net » meta

Renovations

vic — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 06:22:53 +0000

Carrington Blog crapped out on me while upgrading, so here's this shiny new theme.

Nice place you’ve got here.

vic — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 02:23:34 +0000

Be a shame if something happened to it. Like you left it alone for a couple months. Let's rectify that, shall we?

I figured it was time for a reboot anyway.

vic — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 05:03:45 +0000

I've been writing more short blurbs on my Twitter feed - nee my Facebook page - than I have been really writing here, and since I went to all the effort to get the framework of erudity in the state that it's in, I should use it in a better way, rather than randomly throwing rants up.

The idea came to me as I was sorting through photographs of my recent vacation to Massachusetts and New Mexico while being pestered for descriptions of said vacation. I figured, "hey, erudity is a great place to put all these things so that I can just point people *here* - but I don't really do much other than work, which gets quite repetitive."

So now I plan on changing a bit about how I run things. By "things" I don't just mean erudity; I'm also referring to my life. There's more to life than wake, eat, work, eat, home, sleep, repeat, and I should be out there experiencing (and writing) about it. So coming up there'll be posts about my vacation with Kendra; about my readings of Preacher and Ex Machina; about my experiences with house hunting and being a landlord; about my recent discussion with Kendra's family about religion; and all sorts of myriad things that I take for granted that I'm doing. I think that writing about them will help me to further appreciate just how awesome life really is.

So standby, cause here... we... go!

New theme

vic — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 17:36:12 +0000

Old theme was getting to be meh. Trying out this one for a while.

I feel you, Fafblog.

vic — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 01:56:34 +0000

Monthly is a bad posting schedule for a blog.

CMSs and Usability

vic — Fri, 30 May 2008 05:29:10 +0000

My first blogging experience was on blogger.com in 2000, where I recounted the experiences of that summer. It was pretty easy to use and wrote to a remote site on a server that I had. After that blog fell into disuse, I wrote on a collaborative blog that used WordPress 1.3 and the b2 theme, hosted on a different server, but still one that I owned. We settled on it because it was pretty easy to install and we could see what was going on under the hood, making it easy to muck about with the layout. After a year or so, we upgraded to WP 2.0 in order to use newer and shinier layouts. This proved to be a disaster, with the end result being an 8 hour session to manually move the content from the old database structure to the new one. When that blog went by the wayside, I focused more on my community of friends that use LiveJournal and moved away from blogs that I had to host myself. After an unfortunate blogging incident, I set all of my entries to friends-only. This is all well and good, but part of the genius of the web is the ease with which ideas are shared amongst people - to include total strangers. So when I saw that "erudity.net" was available, I snatched it up with the intent of getting back to my roots, blogging-wise.

I started by installing Textpattern onto a TextDrive account. You'd think that this would be easy, right? Dean Allen explicitly made the service so that people could use TextPattern as their CMS. Of course, in their transition from self-financed to being owned (pwnd?) by Joyent, a good many things seem to have gone awry. After a bit of wrangling, I got TextPattern up and running with the default template - hooray! Now let's get it looking pretty. And don't get me wrong, there are a lot of really pretty TextPattern templates out there. Which all take a BS in Comp Sci to install. In this day and age there is no reason to have to manually add, edit and delete pages in a CMS setup in order to get a template to work - that's not a template, that's a set of directions for customizing your website. If I wanted to do that, I would have just started from scratch. (Which, incidentally, is exactly what my friend who runs TextPattern recommended.)

So POOF to TextPattern. Call me when you get a usable system for managing design and layout, to say nothing of plugins. I'm now running WordPress again, which is VASTLY improved since I last used it. Now all I have to do is get the dumb "powered by black minimalism" watermark off the top of the layout and I'm set.