Empire Maintenance

I finally got around to refreshing the layouts of my various web properties, namely my web site and this blogger template. Let me tell you, both were in bad shape. The banner now reads "vortices" whereas before it was "Vezquex's Vortices". The branding change doesn't really make sense. The domain is vezquex.com, after all. But it was the best logo I have at the moment. It looks pretty sweet over the fantasy space background; don't you think? I lifted it from a Russian guy, but let's keep that between you and me ;). The menu has some new items and should be easier to navigate.

The image used to make the menu bar is now monochrome and transparent so that it can be an arbitrary color using a background color, plus it looks cool over an image. I took out the Friendfeed widget from my home page and moved to the blog's side bar. I adopted their technique of many favicons linking to profiles. I still want to better integrate this blog into the site, but I haven't decided exactly how to approach that.

I've also been doing a lot over on AppJet. The concept of throway apps is great. I wrote a two libraries, lib-subdomain and lib-style, just for making my other libraries look nicer. I've bundled some pretty useful things into lib-general. But I haven't forgotten about the apps. One I recently made is an anonymous (for now) message board with support for external images and mp3s. I'm actually trying to write a user account library, but there are some bugs in it that I haven't quite solved, so it's not finished. There is of course an existing library that does the same thing, but I don't like its execution. (My main gripe is that it sends you to a separate page to log in.) On the lighter side of things, I have rewritten the PHP Novebruary script in JavaScript on AppJet, with added support for Septogust, so mark your calendars. I'll reimplement the widget too.

Comments weren't working. Turns out they were turned off. But no longer!

I somehow got the idea that to use the Disqus commenting system comments had to be turned off on Blogger. That makes sense, because surely Blogger comments should be disabled so that they are not competing with Disqus. Maybe the way Disqus or Blogger works changed at some point because the commenting feature has been missing for a quite a while. And yet, it was working just fine on my other blog, so I investigated. I went to the comments section of Blogger settings for both blogs and looked for any differences. Oh! Comments were turned off for new posts on the Vezquex Blog. I toggled this setting and then went back through the old posts to make sure each one allowed comments. It would have been easier if Blogger had a toggle box for comments on the Manage Posts page so that you could handle it all at once. But I don't post that much, so it didn't take too long.

Whoa, Updates

Well, the fancy ass website design has made its way over to the blog finally. And what better way to congratulate me than donate? (It's in the drop down menu...in the upper right...the one that says "Menu".) Speaking of that menu, I just realized that it contains a recursive link to the blog. Which gives me an idea for another post...

What to do?

I am really opposed to all of the superfluous data associated with this blog. I realized this when updating my template to match my site better. I had to type in the midst of what seems like an entirely new language Google has developed specifically for blogs. I have a much easier time on my site by just copying the previous story div element, advancing the date, and writing my new item. Even if it does take slightly longer, the code is so much cleaner, and there is so much more I can do with it. I just added a rudimentary category system using class properties. If I add pagination and a little form for myself, I'll have my own perfect CMS. Even more ideal and possibly even easier, I could use an existing "News" sub-forum to feed onto the home page.

The problem is, blogger is such a link magnet, what with it pinging the world every time you post. Well, maybe I'll keep this around for useless crap and anything noteworthy will be at the site.