Month: August 2007

Pushing it forward

This is another update on the progress of the theme change, which turned out to be slightly more than that.  I am also going through the plugins used on the site, adding stuff, removing stuff, fixing annoyances, and doing all those small things I wanted to do for some time now.

Latest changes:

  • When you search for something now, the search terms are highlighted in the results.  The same is true if you came to this blog from the search engine results.
  • SPAM Karma 2 plugin was replaced with Akismet.  SK2 got a bit clumsy and went a bit out of control, eating comments, forgetting to notify me of things, and getting a bit heavy on the administration side.  Akismet on the other hand is a pretty light and simple thing.  And since I already have an API key, there is no good reason not to use it. I’ve been more than happy on how it worked for my WordPress.com blogs.
  • Also added WordPress.com stats plugin which provides a better and up-to-date overview of who is coming here and what you guys are reading here.  Google Analytics is used as well.  Hopefully that’s not too much of a drag together.

I was surprised to find out that there were some legitimate comments in moderation queue – some of them were posted ages ago and I never got them approved or replied.  Hopefully that won’t happen again.

Other than that, I’m really enjoying the new look and feel of the site.  Also, I’ll try to use images a bit more often in the posts (one per post or something like that).  Text-only stuff starts to look boring.

Daily tweets

  • My ultimate usage of MyBlogLog comes down to seeing my face all over the web. And enjoying it… #
  • The question of the day is – will I get sued or merely not paid? #
  • Twitter for groups sounds cool! http://www.jazzychad.net/twgroups/ <http://www.jazzychad.net/twgroups/> #
  • With this group thing, I wish more of the ppl I know where Twittering. #
  • Google Phone=Linux+GPS+Google+cheap. Sounds like something that I want. http://tinyurl.com/ytml8t <http://tinyurl.com/ytml8t> #

Enjoying the “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation”

Although I try to limit my television to as little as I can, I have to say that I enjoy the “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” series. Not that I a big fan of detective genre or occasional lesson in human anatomy, but somehow it all comes together. It’s a slow going story with episodes being separated enough so that I can watch them each on its own, but with enough connection to build the characters. It has a little bit of everything – life, humor, action, crime, nice stories, pretty good acting; and the proportions work for me.

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

(image source: IMDB)

There are a few other TV series on roughly the same subject going on at roughly the same time, but nothing comes even close. They seem to either focus on supermodel cops, or deepest details of decomposed organic materials, or on vague logic connecting scenes together. None of these appeals to me after a long day at work.

Browsing through IMDB, I get the feeling that I’m not the only one enjoying the series. For better or worse, they’ve made through eight (8!) seasons and still going. Also the user rating seems rather high – 8.6 out of 10. Nice.

New theme tour

While I’m still working on the theme, I thought I’d give you a brief of overview of changes, except for the obvious visual ones.

  • Google AdSense is gone.  I’ve been planning to do this for a long time but never got down to it.  I don’t want to have any ads on my personal blog anymore.  And, it wasn’t making me that much anyway.
  • RSS feed got fixed.  The problem was caused by one of the plugins which I’m not using for a long time now.  Sorry for the delayed inconvenience.
  • Flickr images moved from top of the page to the side.  It should make page loading a bit faster, but this remains to be seen.  More testing and feedback needed here.
  • Comments are separated from pingbacks and trackbacks.  I have yet to find one of the posts that has both comments and trackbacks (this was a long time ago), but the theme seems to support it.
  • A few old and broken pages are gone now (Archives, Blogroll, Stats, Affiliate stuff, etc).  Instead, blog gained the site map.  It might still go over a few changes though.  The permanent link to it is at the bottom of the page.
  • There is now a list of recent entries on the sidebar.  I remember a few people requesting this.  Maybe I’ll add the comments too one day.
  • There are a few header images now, which depend on your location on the site.

Things that remain to be done are:

  • sort out categories and tags, especially with the upcoming WordPress 2.3 taxonomy in mind
  • select and crop my own header images