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I'll have the new design up tomorrow, I think. I got tied up trying to make it validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional tonight. I have a few bugs that cropped up during that process, but I hope to have everything arranged OK tomorrow. We'll see…
Maybe it's because Christopher and Kevin just switched to spiffy new designs. Maybe it is because I am procrastinating on some work. Maybe it's because it has been years since I did more than a cursory update to my site design (2002, if my memory serves). Whatever the case may be, I feel that it is time for change. I'm going to try to dabble in CSS and see if I can bring my site into the modern age. If my dabbling goes well, things may look different later today, if my dabbling fails, you'll just have to live with this look for awhile longer.
Update (2005.02.19 23:59): It isn't going to go up today, if you didn't already guess that. I'm aiming for tomorrow. All I can say is that I have come to really like doing layouts in CSS today. All of my cratchty complaining about CSS layouts may have been ill advised. You can teach an old web-dev dog new tricks!
Well, I added my “official mug shot” to the right column of this page. I point you back to yesterday's post for the appropriate warnings about it, but it is at least better than the last. This is the head shot I referenced earlier this week.
As I noted previously, I've been on the web for either ten or eleven years now (I can't recall exactly when I first popped open a web browser — I think 1994), and this is a first. I've thought about doing so before, but just never got around to it. But now I have and Ed cannot complain about me should I decide to turn asisaid into an Internet Church now.
In other news, I did some minor adjustments to my Choose Your Own Adventure piece, so that it now specifically says that Riley was trying to contact the police. I'm not sure if it is quite what Christopher was looking for, though, so he is welcome to throw a rotten tomato at me and tell me to fix it in some other fashion, if he'd like.
I'm not sure if anyone has (or ever will, for that matter) make use of the topics on the sidebar, but as long as I have them, I decided to start putting things in order. My blog has been subtlety shifting to less of a technology focus (at least I think it has, did you notice?) and so I shifted things around to avoid placing new content into Miscellaneous. The Linux category and some other technology sections were merged into the existing Comp/Tech category, which makes more sense. Here's what's new:
In addition, I'll be adding a Religion category soon, which should round out the new “Humanities Section.” This will house some posts I'd like to write on the Academic/Critical Study of Religion (not negative — critical can be positive) as opposed to my present Faith category, which normally focuses on the personal experience of faith in Jesus as opposed to systematic study of doctrines. If this difference sounds vague, stay tuned, as that will be the subject of my next post (or perhaps one post after that), time permitting.
You may have noticed I've added topics to the side column of the site now. I just stuck them there for the moment without concern for aesthetic issues, which I hope to deal with on this site in the next few weeks. I'll also need to re-organize to remove some of the topics that I've ceased to use and merge topics that are redundant.
Back when I was using my fork of Ciaran's Journal tool, I had hacked in topics by replacing another field, but there was never a place that listed all of the topics being used — an article was simply added if I typed in the right name in the box when posting (if I typed in something different, a new topic would be “created”). Now that I can see them all at once, I can see where I've changed topic names at times and can avoid doing likewise in the future.
Cookies now work (or should), subjects are automatically filled out in comments again, “Read More” links only show up when they should, etc. Am I done? Not even close, but I am closer. Let me know if you see any new bugs (or any old ones I've seemed to have overlooked — other than stuff like padding around text (the layout is on my list to fix).
Oh, and here is the RSS feed, if you are interested.
So the software that was running asIsaid was the great-granddaddy of Safari? Or are they different?
I've talked a lot about SAFARI on asisaid over the past year or so, but I've never really given it a formal introduction. Therefore, for anyone with time to kill, I present the Genealogy of SAFARI. It's a bit more complicated than a simple yes or no answer to the above question, and I'll seek to make the story interesting, so read on.
The old blogging software I've been using seems to have given up its ghost. It's dead. As a doornail. Gone. Bit the dust. Bought the farm. All the entries now refuse to appear, although all the data is intact on the server. I have no idea why.
Fortunately, I've been planning a blogware update to my new SAFARI 2 Content System. Unfortunately, I discovered some bugs in it this afternoon as I was considering migrating it (this was all before I realized my blogware had died). Fortunately, I've fixed most of those bugs. Unfortunately, I haven't fixed all of them yet.
My big hope is that I'll return to the blogosphere within the next few days, at worst, maybe tonight, at best. In the mean time, I'll update this page, but I don't want to put too much effort into this static page.
I've placed a place holder article on OfB.biz where you can comment on this “entry” if you'd like to. Click here to read and post comments.
In the mean time…If you have not visited all of the sites on my blogroll before, why not visit one of them right now?
You get to decide what to post to your own blog, but what about someone else's? Here's your chance to boss me around. The readers of asisaid can discuss what they would like me to post about, and I will blog about the topic agreed upon by the comment posters to this post. Here's a few requirements: (1) it should be a topic I can discuss within a typical sized post, certainly not more than two pages and (2) it should not require research of any substantial sort. If you were thinking of assigning me to write the book you always wish had been written, I'm sorry, but I cannot promise I'll do that.
So what do you think? Post your ideas below. I will not be commenting in the comments for this post — it is up to you and your fellow asisaid readers to come to a consensus on this.
Here are some blogroll items I've been meaning to do and/or ask about:
asisaid Blogroll now with a personal touch: I decided to give my blogroll a more personal touch by switching from blog names to the names of the bloggers. Here's how I did it: if you publish your whole name on your site, your whole name went on the roll. If you publish only your first name and/or I am aware that you don't really want your whole name tied to your blog, I only included your first name or first name plus last initial. If I made a mistake, let me know. If I didn't put down your last name and you don't care if I do, comment below; if I did put down your last name and you don't want it listed, let me know that too. Thanks!
I also added a link to a blog by a friend of mine who just joined the blogosphere. Go take a look at Deep Thought and give Chris a hardy welcome! It looks like it should be an interesting blog for those interested in Macs (Chris has contributed a couple commentaries to OfB.biz, including one I mentioned the other day).
please ping weblogs.com: I'd like to ask a favor, if I may. If you have a blog, please “ping” (your weblog software should support XML-RPC pinging) weblogs.com and/or blogrolling.com when you update your blog. If your blog is at the bottom of my blogroll, that probably means you never ping and therefore blogrolling never moves your name to the top of my list. If you ping, then I'll know when you've updated and that means I (and others using BlogRolling's or Wordpress's ability to denote updated blogs) can enjoy your new posts.
blogrolling asisaid.com: In a similar vein, if you are blogrolling me, remember that the address I ping is http://asisaid.com/journal/, not just http://asisaid.com/ or http://www.asisaid.com/ or any other variation. Therefore, if you are wondering why update notification never works on my blog, you now know why. It is rather unfortunate that the XML-RPC ping spec does not provide a convenient way to provide alternate URL's (as far as I know), but since it doesn't, the address must be exactly the correct one for update notification to work.
