Hidden Peanuts

I’ve completed a long, LONG overdue Wordpress upgrade. As a result, most of my customizations no longer work… I’ll get around to making the site pretty again someday soon, but for now it’ll be stuck on the default theme.

(But I’m guessing most people read via RSS anyway)

Something exploded in my site’s layout overnight… not really sure what happened, since I made no changes at all. But I’ve reverted to an old theme for now, hopefully I’ll have time to fix it up in the near future.

Update: and, the issue magically fixed itself! Please leave a comment if you see any irregularities. I suppose this is a sign that it’s time to do a Wordpress upgrade.

I finally had time recently to sit down and finish tweaking the site’s new theme.

Perhaps most notably, the category links in the sidebar work again! And my ‘now reading’ display plugin is back as well.

As far as I’ve tested, this setup looks ok in all browsers. Let me know if I missed one!

Of course, if you’re reading via RSS, you probably never even noticed

I’ve decided to give the site an overhaul, since fixing my current theme to work in IE7 would be more trouble than it’s worth. I’ll be playing with a few designs over the next few days. Comments/thoughts would be appreciated!

A couple of people have asked me where I disappeared to since I last posted, and this summer in general. Nowhere exciting this month I’m afraid - I’ve just been extremely busy. My job turned one year old a few days ago, and I’m in the midst of experiencing my first start of the fall semester there. I wasn’t quite ready for the rush of professors wanting to bring their classes in. But I’m not complaining, it is definitely good to be useful. Oh, and I’m also officially Faculty now! The title change doesn’t affect what I do from day to day, but the recognition is very nice.

I also did a lot of traveling this summer. I visited:

-New Orleans
-Rochester
-Pittsburgh
-An unintended night in Atlanta
-Chicago
-Passed through Nashville

I feel like I’m leaving something off that list, hmm…

In what free time I’ve had, I’ve gotten a decent amount of reading done. I finally got to finishing the Chronicles of Narnia, I’m well into the Dresden Files series, and fit in a couple of random novels in between.

In gaming, I really didn’t get to it that much this summer. But I did play through Ultimate Spider-Man for the Xbox. It’s a very short game (I finished it in a total of about 6 hours), but also very well executed. The voice acting and plot are of a surprising caliber compared to most games, let alone comic book based ones. I paid $5 for it, which was more than fair. Oh, and of course my DS got a workout while traveling.

My Netflix subscription also atrophied a bit - just didn’t have time to watch much. But I’ve lately been catching up on HBO’s Entourage, and loving every episode. After I’m done with that, I plan on re-watching all the Star Trek movies. Today’s news that the original Kirk series will be re-released with updated special effects inspired me. It’s been years since I saw most of them. But my in-theater movie highlight of the summer? Snakes on a Plane. Great cheesy fun.

On the gadget front, I upgraded my phone to a Razr. The V3m specifically, and I absolutely love it. The 1.3 megapixel camera in it performs surprisingly well outside, although it has problems indoors.

One random highlight of the summer: A behind the scenes tour of the US Space & Rocket Center’s archives, as part of our work with them to digitize their collection. I’m more than a bit of a space geek at heart, so it was an especially amazing collection to me.

So yes, life is good. I’m mostly looking forward to this oppressive southern summer’s end. Maybe I’m a wimp, but I don’t know how anybody lived here before air conditioning arrived.

Next week my fall/winter travel set begins: Disney World (!), Buffalo for a wedding, Nashville for LITA Forum, various holiday travels, and who knows what else.

On a final technical note, I see that my category links aren’t working correctly. They miss all posts made since I switched from categories to tags. Whoops! I’ll try to get that fixed soon.

I’m finally back from a whirlwind two weeks of travel, during which I visited: New Orleans, Nashville, Atlanta, Rochester, Pittsburgh, and the Thousand Islands area. Atlanta was not an intended destination, but thanks to Delta’s atrocious customer service I got to spend the night. That’s a horror story for another time. Needless to say I’m exhausted, but it was more than worth the craziness to see so many family members and friends.

I’m suffering from information overload now that I have time to sit down and see all that I missed. My list of RSS feeds has never been quite so intimidating.

I had an interesting experience at a gas station in rural Pennsylvania. There I got to use the RFID chip embedded in my new debit card for the first time. While seamless (just wave the card, no button pushing necessary at all), the process makes me a bit nervous. Something about removing the safeguard of a PIN feels wrong, and I’m placing a lot of faith in my bank’s ability to make my chip uncopyable. This wouldn’t bother me in, say, a library card. But in a card so closely tied to my financial identity, it’s another matter entirely.

An interesting note: The Wordpress plugin I use to display what I’m currently reading on my site (Now Reading) can’t handle books that aren’t published yet, so I’ve disabled it for the moment. If anyone is interested, I’m currently in the middle of Stephen King’s upcoming Lisey’s Story, which I grabbed a preprint of at ALA.

You might notice that I’ve added tags to each post, courtesy of the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin.

If you’re not familiar with the concept: Just click on a tag (after ‘Filed Under:’ above), and a page will load with every post I’ve written that has the same tag assigned.

At the very bottom of the page you can find a nifty tag cloud, where the size of a tag represents how often I’ve used it. I may move this elsewhere on the site soon.

One tagging question: Is there an easier way with this plugin to go back and assign tags to my older posts than doing each one individually? I’d love to be able to do it all on one page, because doing each post separately will take literally forever.

In the past, I’ve loved using the Wordpress Structured Blogging plugin. It adds a nice review form to my posting page. I fill in how many stars, a picture, etc, and it makes sure all my reviews are consistently formatted.

As part of today’s upgrade to Wordpress 2.0.1, I also upgraded the Structured Blogging plugin. Now, I can’t edit my posts created with earlier versions!

This fact is noted on the official wiki, but of course I didn’t think to check there first.

So after an hour of playing with Ultimate Tag Warrior, and finally getting it working, I can’t add any tags to any review I’ve ever written with the plugin. I suppose I could go directly into the database and insert them manually, but I really don’t want to do that.

One of the main reasons I added tags was so I could group posts better. For example, giving everything from the Gaming in Libraries conference one tag. But because I wrote those session summaries in the Structured Blogging plugin’s form, no can do.

I am not happy.

Tomorrow I’m going to take the plunge and finally upgrade to Wordpress 2.0.1. If the site implodes shortly after, assume that’s why.

Update: done! Painless and easy. Let me know if anything does not behave correctly, please.

I’ve been waiting to post this until I actually wrote an entry there, but this year I’ll be posting movie reviews to The Camera Eye.

The blog is the brainchild of Evan, who I went to college with. He pretty much got me into writing movie reviews for the campus paper (and later I became entertainment editor), so how could I say no? I’m really looking forward to contributing, even if I don’t see as many movies as I’d like. We have seven contributors at the moment, so there should be a pretty steady stream of new posts.

Here’s my first review, King Kong.