Blog 2.0

Actually, it’s probably the 3rd or 4th major revamping of this site. Visually, this upgrade is a little more subtle, but behind the scenes there have have been some major overhauls. A few of the notable differences:

Content Engine: The biggest change is that I switched from Movable Type to Wordpress. Honestly, both have all the functionality I need, but my webhost (1and1) sets very low timeouts on scripts, which means that MT’s rebuilding process often died while trying to crunch it’s way through the archives of the site. I hear that the next generation of MT will be sleeker and faster, but I got tired of waiting. Wordpress seems to be working well so far, and the migration wasn’t too difficult.

Visual Upgrades: You’ll probably notice the wider margins, along with some minor (and ongoing) tweaks to the style of the site. If time permits, I’m going to overhaul the layout even more, but I’ll leave it here for tonight. There are a ton of web designers whose work influences my ideas, notably Kottke, Matt Haughey, and the old stylings of SimpleBits. Unfortunately, I never seem to have the time to put most of those ideas in place. C’est la vie.

Twitter Integration: I’ve started using Twitter to do microblogging, and those posts will be appearing here on the site (probably in a daily-digest form). It’s a nice way to shoot off quick one-liners as I think of things throughout the day. I’m using Twitter Tools, with a few PHP hacks that I threw in to make it work the way I wanted.

Please let me know if you find anything broken (chris at ‘this domain’). More technical stuff under the fold.

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MT 4.0

Just upgraded, this is a test post.

Update: Surprisingly smooth upgrade. Nice work, SixApart!

RIP, Linkblog

Following Kottke’s lead, I decided that having a separate linkblog in the sidebar is probably a bad idea. Practically, it means that most people miss the cool stuff I’m posting that day.

So as much as I loved Tumblr’s quickpost interface, it’s back to MT bookmarklets for now. I’ll look into installing MT4 soon, which supposedly has some nice features. At this point in the week though, sleep and science are taking priority over everything else. I even forgot to eat lunch today.

Overload

I know that half of my posting these days seems to be about grad school and science, but I suppose that’s what a PhD program does to you. Hopefully, I’ll venture back into politics once the primaries get a little bit closer, but right now, I could give a rat’s ass.

Since I rarely have time to make substantial posts anymore, I’ll try to at least pass on a better selection of links to things I’ve read and enjoyed.

Quick (two question) survey

I need to revamp my site a little, so I have two quick questions for you readers. If you read the site regularly, do me a favor and take 30 seconds to take this anonymous survey

I’m beginning to wonder if maintaining my linkblog separately is a mistake. Tumblr has a great bookmarklet for one-click posting of articles, which is why I made the move. It makes it really easy on my end. If no one is reading the stuff, though, I may move that content back into the main site.

(And yes, I know that it’s a pain in the ass to click through twice to get to the articles on the linkblog, and I already plan on fixing that, no matter what I end up doing with the links)

RSS woes

If you’re having trouble viewing this site through RSS, unsubscribe and resubscribe to the blog. It turns out my old RSS feed was linked inappropriately, and when I switched hosting plans, the old link broke.

Google-fame

Apparently, this old post of mine is the number one google hit for “Fundamentalist Propaganda”.

It’s too bad, really. I was expecting it to point here:

Linkblog, Part II

Long story short, my current webhost doesn’t offer access to cron jobs, so I had to upgrade to Movable Type 3.33 in order to get the linkblog feed working correctly. It seems to work great though - you’ll find it to your right in the sidebar.

The plan is to post snippets and fun links over there, and keep more substantial entries here on the main blog. There will probably be more daily activity on the linkblog, so be sure to subscribe to that RSS feed too.

Linkblog

Since most of my posts lately have been links to interesting webfinds, I decided to start a linkblog. You can find it at http://www.chrisamiller.org/.

So far I like the ease of posting that tumblr provides, and if I end up using the linkblog a lot, I’ll integrate it into the main site here.

Testing

The migration is done, and I think everything is back in working order. Report any bugs you encounter to chris at <thisdomain> dot com

Downtime

My hosting plan is expiring, and I’ll be switching servers sometime in the next week. While the migration happens, there may be some downtime on the site. If that happens, check back in a day or two and all should be well.

Card Catalog Entry

Make your own

New Header

Another quick and dirty title bar to commemmorate tonight’s victory. If I get time later, I’ll fix up the donkey - he’s a little rough around the edges.

BTW - why 2000? Because that’s the year I first voted.

Wishlist

I added a link to my Wishlist in the sidebar. So now you have no excuse for not buying me stuff.

Boys of Summer

A quick and dirty redesign to commemorate the Cardinals’ entry into the NLCS.

World Series, here we come!

(Refresh your browser if you don’t see the new red titlebar)

Categories

I went back through my archives and tagged all my posts with categories, and you can now peruse through them over on the right (below the blogroll). The “favorites” category is a good place to start if you’re new to the site.

Hiatus

The blog will be going dark for a while. My qualifying exam due dates are coming up and I need to buckle down for a while. I promise that I’ll be back by October at the latest, when things settle down.

If I may paraphrase

Small people blog about people.
Average people blog about things.
Great people blog about ideas.

I’ll strive to do more of the latter now that I’m back in town and on a semi-regular schedule again.

Odd

This week, one person landed on this site after doing a google search for “chris miller nude”. I’m sure they were horribly disappointed.

Excuse the Mess

Working on some improvements to the site tonight. Will someone please give the comments a try and tell me if they work?

Update:

a) Yes, the comments work.
b) Everything should be valid XHTML/CSS now (it was pretty close before, but I fixed a few lazy bugs.)
c) Yes, by cleaning up the site I’m putting off lots of things I should be doing.
d) What else is new?