Double Blind

I have updated to WordPress 3.0, and surprisingly the upgrade went very smoothly – one click and it is done. I have no idea how those guys make money, but they have done an incredible job since the first versions where you had to get into ssh and manually unpack and replace files and such.

I know there are some new features in version 3.0 that I would like to implement on some of my other websites. I haven’t substantially changed the interface on Double Blind since its inception 7 years ago, and I plan to keep things that way. In particular, the black background and white font can only be pried away from my cold dead hands!

A very quick review of WordPress 2.9; it feels faster and more refined. It didn’t break anything, so if you’re running 2.8.6, just click on the upgrade and it will be seamless.

I have decided to split off my finance and economics-related posts to Divestor. The reasoning was that I think the financial-related matters have been distracting from the main purpose of this site, which has always intended to deal with more quirky and anecdotal commentaries.

Political commentary that does not directly deal with financial or economic matters will still be here.

I am somewhat concerned that there are three domains that I am maintaining – DoubleBlind.ca, Divestor.com and SachaPeter.ca (which is reserved for Cultus Lake Park Board-related business), but I think partitioning them in this way makes logical sense. If not, I will consolidate everything later – WordPress has a fairly good export/import function.

I am messing around with the site design. This could be dangerous, but I am trying to enhance the readability of certain fonts on the site (specifically the micro-tiny font for entering in comments). I’ve already upgraded to the new template of Black Letterhead by Ulysses Ronquillo which is what the core of this site is built on. It is a very minimalist template, which makes it very easy to mess around with.

Unfortunately when playing around with site templates, I am reminded why I would never want to be a web designer for a career – fixing the miscellaneous issues between Internet Explorer and Firefox is a real pain in the ass. I just don’t have the patience anymore to make them identical – it looks a lot better on Firefox than it does on Internet Explorer.

Finally, I have taken the liberal assumption that almost everybody out there will be browsing at 1024×768 resolution or higher, so I have correspondingly increased the width of the text portion of the weblog. This will enable me to post wider pictures than I have been able to in the past.

I will be away for a week. Back on or around Thanksgiving.

Posting will be very light between now and the New Year. Have a good holiday break, try not to gain too much weight!

Update: Very light? Maybe not. We’ll see.

I have upgraded to WordPress 2.7.  As far as I can tell, most of the changes are cosmetic.  I’m going to go through the change document to find out what they actually added in here.

It’s getting frustrating dealing with all of these user interface changes – the previous major change was with WordPress 2.  The mental costs of retraining oneself to the new interface is something that likely isn’t taken into consideration when publishers do this sort of stuff.  Still, I paid absolutely nothing for it so I can’t complain.  Certainly it beats posting with plain HTML.

Will be back on or around August 12th. Been going around the southern part of BC and will be on Vancouver Island, safely away from the civilized world.

WordPress released another version today, version 2.6. Unlike the rather negative UI changes in the previous version, this one remained the same, but incorporated some significantly enhanced features including version tracking.

The other feature which I took full advantage of is the theme previewer – Doubleblind operates on a derivative of Black Letterhead and I have upgraded from version 1.3 of the template to version 1.5. The user will see little difference other than a few tweaks I have made to the site template. And if you are using IE7 (heaven forbid), things should looks slightly better.

As I continue playing around with the site templates of both Doubleblind and BC2009, I am getting a rather good feel of CSS and site design. The design for Black Letterhead is very clean and elegant and I like working with it. The site template I lifted for BC2009 was heavily modified and the CSS in it is so poorly designed that I’m afraid to touch anything in case if the whole thing breaks. I always keep backups of the templates before I go on any wholesale changes, but in terms of development time, having a simple CSS makes life a lot, lot easier.

Finally, WordPress included in-house the concept of Tags (which were used by trillions of Web 2.0 applications before), but I have consciously decided not to bother writing any – I’ve never figured out how these could be useful considering that the Google search utility I recently installed for the site seems to work quite well.

Also, on the same theme, I have consciously decided to remove any references to submitting articles to Digg, Reddit, Technorati, del.icio.us, etc., simply because if this site got popular it would make life a lot more difficult for me.

I’ve been pruning the links on the right hand side.

If you haven’t posted in 3 months, I have removed the link to your site. If at sometime in the future you’ve resumed, just send me a note and I’ll get you back on.

I’ve also been trying to find some more BC political-related weblogs – aiming for all partisan stripes and also non-partisan.