Adam’s Peace

I have a new theme. For those of you who are reading the RSS feed (which was seamlessly transferred to run through FeedBurner), come on down and see the updates to the site.

While I was monkeying around with my own theme (and of course multitasking like crazy), I made a comment on Henrik Edburg’s PositivityBlog, and was shocked to see some very subtle AJAX functionality. Being a nerd, who thinks that code can be art, I was very impressed, and I set out to find the plugin that worked so smoothly. It turned out not to be a plugin, but a feature in a very well put-together theme. The creators of Kubric, the default Wordpress theme, have outdone themselves, and have created a new theme, K2, which has some very handy features for administering your blog. The sidebar has a handy, draggable interface, so the amount of work that you have to do to add items is greatly reduced. No more hunting through the sidebar file, reading the PHP code, to find the right spot to place even more code. If you want to make a change to an item, you can find that item very quickly and easily now as well.

Overall, I’m very impressed that the creators of the theme have kept the theme powerful, but have also made it much easier to use. I still don’t have the two sidebars that I want, but the random images in the header are a definite bonus. Most of the layout editing is finished for now, with just a few tweaks as I come to them. One thing that I don’t like about the theme, though, is that it puts a whole bunch of CSS information into the top of the page, which I understand hurts site indexing slightly. We’ll see how the Google ranking grows as time goes on and see if it really does matter or not.

Also, I now have the time to post a page every weekday, so I’ll be taking the weekends off, using that time to research and implement features for the blog.

Don’t worry, everyone. I’m still here working away at some articles.

Right now, I’m somewhere between finishing a few articles and getting ideas for new ones. There should be a full, rather long, and somewhat controversial article completed by the end of the week; I just need input from a couple of people, and I still have to proofread it.

If you have JavaScript enabled, you’ll notice three extra buttons, two at the top of each post, and one at the bottom, linking to Reddit, Digg, and Del.ico.us. The rules are simple: If you think that people who might not normally read this blog would find something useful from an article, go ahead and submit it. If it has already been submitted, go ahead and vote for it. Unfortunately, only Reddit has a way to vote against an article, so if you don’t like a particular post, then there is only one way to say so anonymously. (There are still comments and a contact form for those who don’t mind being at least partially identified.) If you think that an article is just a waste of time, (such as this one) but isn’t ‘bad,’ then just go ahead and ignore those buttons. I won’t be submitting the articles myself; rather, I much prefer that you decide whether it is worthy of being submitted or not.

I’ve made yet another change in how I’m creating articles. I have tried to write short articles in the past, but I have found that I just don’t get enough useful information across to make the posts worthwhile. Now, I’m going to the other extreme. I’m packing a lot of information into each post, so you may want to find a time where you can sit and read for a while when you visit here. This means that updates will be further apart, as I’m planning on taking about a week to write each one, plus a few days to proofread and fact check where necessary. If I go past two weeks, drop me a line, and I’ll let everyone know what the holdup is, as well as push myself to finish one of the articles.