Archive for the ‘The Digs’ Category

Tentative restart

It inevitably happens.

I toss the stale coffee, I eat the last of the week-old salami, I throw away the fuzzy biscuit… and Plagioclase’s mother asks “Where’s that food item I was saving for later?”

I think I’ve talked about this before, but lately it seems to be even more pronounced. Maybe it’s because I’m home now (after two months away) and her eating schedule is disrupted? Maybe it’s because after cleaning out my mom’s house (in preparation for selling it), I’m more attuned to the crap that’s accumulating in my house?

In this cleaning up phase, I’m considering what to do with Nothing Funny about Feldspar. I thought for a while that I might just quit blogging, but I keep composing posts in my head (it’s just like talking to myself, only in better sentences). Then I thought I’d start up another blog somewhere else, but I didn’t want to have to figure out a name.

So here I am, somewhat back again. I’m going to try to not be so depressing or angry or whatever down mood I’ve been in — a more lighthearted look for a while for me, I think. Probably a case of me trying to wag the dog, but I’m hoping that by not writing about downer topics will help me get over them.

I’ll also try not to pick on Plagioclase’s mother so much. I’m grateful for her support and companionship, and after all, she had a large part in making my beloved Plagioclase the man he is.

But if she asks me again where the thing is that I just threw away, I might just drag it out of the trash for her.

 

Notice anything?

Nothing funny about feldspar has a new look, thanks to the wordpress theme viewer and Fresh 0.8 by Rupert Morris.1

I like it ’cause it isn’t white and it doesn’t have a horizontal header. I also was looking for a theme that uses sidebar widgets, but I realized that I was tweaking them so much to make ‘em look right that I just edited the stock sidebar to suit me better.

I still love the spotty theme! But I thought we all needed some redecoration…2

  1. Theme based on huddletogether. This theme was designed by Lokesh and destriped and built by oriol, then tweaked by Rupert.
  2. If you’re using Safari, you’ll have to delete your icon cache to see the new favicon jewelry ;)
 

A new capability

I just installed a new wordpress plugin for footnotes1. It uses a simple markup2 around the footnote text, and will degrade somewhat gracefully (by having the footnote text inline) if the plugin stops working.

Nice and simple. Now to consider styling (or not) the footnote markers…. Nah. Too much effort on a nice Saturday.

  1. Like this one. See?
  2. two parens
 

And yet one more WP thing

I’ve reset the post.php to its intended form (well, kinda — I only commented out the stuff I added in, just in case).

Let’s see how long it takes. Uh. Faster, but not working…

(oops, forgot to uncomment the php call that feeds the iframe)

There! All better. Though I wish I’d had some warning about this.

 

Now I’m just testing

I commented out the admin stuff that generates the live preview, and replaced it with the old-style preview. Hopefully it’ll be a little faster to generate the draft. (edit: it is)

Also, I’ve turned off my one plugin (Auto Close Comments) to see if *that* makes any difference.

I’ve tried looking around the WP support forum, but it’s really broken. I can’t ever seem to find anything I’m looking for. But I caught a glimpse of something that might be useful — apparently there should be a cache folder somewhere in my WP directory, which I don’t seem to have.

I’ve posted in the forum — here’s hoping that someone will be able to help me figure it out.

Never mind. I do have a cache directory, and loading it up is what’s taking so freakin’ long. I just keep pushing all the archive buttons and eventually it’ll all be almost-fast ;)

Maybe I’ll try the live preview thingy again… it is kinda cool. And I wonder if somebody has made a nicer CSS for the admin pages…