April 22, 2009 - A Novel Image for Your Difference Engine's Optical Interface
Unless you are reading this through an RSS viewer, you can tell that, well, the site has had an across-the-board design makeover. The theme is "Victorian Gothic," and as is obvious, it has a new color scheme as well as new header graphics. It is much more high-contrast than the old theme, and I hope this does not present any visual problems for anyone. One thing all visitors can be assured of, though, is that I absolutely will not change the "dark text on a very light/white background" for the content panels. I get extremely irritated at bright-text-on-dark-background site themes, because I find them very difficult to read without developing eyestrain. Do let me know if this theme causes problems of that nature.
If you are wondering why I made the change, the basic reason is that I got tired of the old theme. Its red/white/blue color scheme and the blatantly political motifs in the page headers were simply not representative of how I want to present myself to the Internet world. I am not a political operative anymore, after all, and though my blog has a political name and most of its content is political in nature, the blog is not the website. Rather, it is a section of it—the section with the overwhelming majority of the domain's political content, among other content. That is not what I want to emphasize now. Going forward, I hope to emphasize my interests in art, writing, and science rather than politics, politics, and politics. The new theme is emblematic of that.
Why "Victorian Gothic"? Well, that's the $64,000 question, isn't it? The short answer is that I admire Victorian art and architecture and that the period saw a revolution in science and mathematics. As for the long answer... Well, let's just say that I am embarking on a project that will, I hope, be quite relevant to the site design at a future date.
(By the way, "difference engine" is essentially the term for "computer" in the steampunk genre.)
March 7, 2009 - It Didn't Break
I decided, as you might have noticed, to widen my website and blog by 100 pixels. The Web is no longer really catering specifically to the 800x600 screen resolution. I believe that 1024x768 or 1280x768 is the most common resolution now. With the way screens are going, this site would end up looking like a little stripe in the middle of the screen if I didn't widen it.
This was the first time I made a major, site-wide change through CSS. I have a custom CSS template for the blog, which is based very strongly on the one I designed for the main site, so I had to change both of them at once. I have tweaked the layout of the pages, but I have not made any far-reaching changes with CSS. This was a "stress test," so to speak. I am pleased to say that my design did not break with this change, nor did I have any straggling elements that were wrongly sized because of an HTML style override within the web page itself. This is an indication that the site truly is CSS-based, and that if I need to change things in the future in a big way, it will be easy to do.
February 19, 2009 - Multiple Updates
Several tweaks today. First, it came to my attention that e-mails sent from my mail system were not getting to me. The reason is because my mailbox was filtering them as spam and autodeleting them according to my e-mail settings. Apologies to anyone who attempted to contact me this way and didn't get a response. I don't know how long this was going on, but I do know that as of November last year it wasn't happening. I think the spam filter is one of these heuristic ones, which means false positives occasionally, but at least they won't be deleted immediately even if they are filtered into my bulk mail.
Secondly, I have made a few tweaks to my blog. I placed the code I mentioned in my last news post into my blog sidebar. Now you can go to the blog and see the updates to this website, just as you can come to this website (which I view as the "hub" now) and view updates to the blog. I have updated my Technorati information on the blog as well; it was still trying to use the old blog system. And for Facebook users, I have installed a WordPress plugin called Wordbook that posts blog updates to my Facebook feed. I don't care much for that site and log in very infrequently, but I had to create a profile a few years back for work. I have kept it active because I do not want someone to impersonate me to friends and people I know. So you can also view updates to the blog on Facebook if you know me personally, although not updates to this website.
February 8, 2009 - Blog Updates in the Sidebar
In consideration of my goal to integrate all parts of this website as much as possible, I decided to provide an automatic list of updates to the blog as a sidebar item to ErinThead.com. It's another PHP script, in this case one that reads the blog's RSS feed and grabs pertinent data from it. I fully intend to provide a reciprocal capability for the blog sidebar as soon as I am able. Look for it in a few days.