The only thing I’ve really missed so far is Apache’s mod_speling [sic], which will automatically correct any one typo or capitalization error when trying to reach a file. It’s nice to have, but far from critical.

If you’re visiting here for the first time, let me make a bit of an introduction. This is my sort of general-purpose blog, where I write about anything from comics and science-fiction to photos, life observations and technology. If you’ve dropped in from The Comics Reporter, you’ll probably be most interested in:

• The Comics Category here at K-Squared Ramblings.
• Comic-Con International 2010 Experience.
• More Convention Reports
• Speed Force, my other blog focusing on the Flash and other speedster super-heroes.

Thanks to Richard Pachter for recommending me!

Last week I had to replace the theme’s comment form (fortunately with something simpler) because it didn’t interact quite right with WordPress 3.0.

What the heck. I haven’t changed the look since 2007, so I might as well give it a shot.

I’ve switched over to Twenty-Ten, using one of my own photos for the banner. It’s a view from Modjeska Grade Road, taken last January.

I’m not quite happy with it yet, but I’m not sure what I want to do next.

My main goals for the new layout are:

• Move the last of the customizations out of the theme and into plugins (so that I can easily switch to another theme if I want to).
• Keep the new page uncluttered and relatively fast-loading (which is why I haven’t added everything back to the sidebar).

I have had to make a couple of adjustments to the theme itself. Twenty-Ten insists on showing excerpts instead of complete posts for archives, categories and searches, so I had to go in and modify that. I also added a couple of bits to the stylesheet: alternating comment backgrounds, tweaks to the old Twitter digests, etc. Still, I’m making a point of keeping those changes minimal and grouped together.

I’m also trying out WP-Minify, which should make scripts and styles load a lot faster, or at least the ones hosted locally. Unfortunately there are still a lot of remote scripts for things like Google Analytics, the Share This buttons, and the Link Within thumbnails. Some of them might work. I’ll have to experiment.

So, things are in a bit of flux. Please let me know if you find something that doesn’t work, or miss something that used to be here, by doing one of the following:

• Leave a comment on this post.
• Use the contact form.
• Email me at kelson – at – pobox – dot – com.

Thanks!

In addition to letting you follow the blog through Facebook, it also lets me auto-publish new posts to my profile. I haven’t decided whether I want to enable that. It’s convenient, but I’m not sure I want every post to be imported. When I had the blog, Twitter and Facebook all linked together, I found myself occasionally making a post on one network and then deleting it from another because it was redundant, or didn’t really apply to the other audience, or there was a better way to cover the same thing in a different format. I also found myself trying to craft posts in one medium for another, rather than playing to their individual strengths. (Consider Facebook vs. Twitter link sharing.)

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The old structure was put in place when I upgraded to WordPress 1.0 six years ago. It seemed reasonable at the time, but the URLs were always just a bit too long. They’d break across lines in email, or get hidden by ellipses in forum posts, or (much later) take up 80% of a post on Twitter. When I launched Speed Force, I took the chance to learn from all the mistakes I’d made with this site and keep it simple from the start. Now that I’ve finished the tweet cleanup project, I’m taking the opportunity to do some more cleanup here.

So, the old structure was this:

http://www.hyperborea.org/journal/archives/yyyy/mm/dd/post-name/

The archives bit is useless, and didn’t do anything but take up space. The day was somewhat more useful, but it’s on the page already, and it’s not critical enough to include in the URL. I considered dropping the www. prefix, but that affects everything on the domain, not just the blog, and I’m sure if I’m ready to do that for my Flash site.

It’s been simplified to this:

http://www.hyperborea.org/journal/yyyy/mm/post-name/

It’s still not tiny by any standard, but it’s a lot more likely to fit on one line of an e-mail, and won’t be quite so unwieldy in social networking.

Next challenge: trying to make some sense out of the mess of categories and tags.

I’ve deleted redundant or trivial items, split some digests by topic, tagged, categorized and titled the rest, fixed typos and expanded abbreviations, reformatted quotes, links and lists, imported photos, and more…all in an attempt to make the archive a little more useful.

After trying to unify some of the more eclectic mixes of unrelated one-line remarks and links, I’ve decided it’s time to stop automatically importing “tweets” to the blog. Sure, the digests maintain quantity, but I think it’ll be better to keep the quality up instead. What makes a good status update doesn’t always make a good blog entry, and I’d frequently find myself either staying up late to edit that day’s “Line Items” post or rewriting it the following day. (Plus I was always worried about a bug in Twitter Tools that would cause a duplicate post about 30-50% of the time.)

I think the blog will be better off if I copy, expand or skip stuff from Twitter at my own pace and put it in a more suitable format to begin with.

You can follow me on Twitter at @KelsonV.

Good: It worked! Every instance of the #fb tag was removed, and everything else stayed.
Bad: Twitter Tools posted four copies of the digest.

Well, Twitter Tools does that sometimes. I’ll frequently see it post 2 or even 3 copies, and while I’ve determined it’s not related to WP Super-Cache, I haven’t gotten around to seriously debugging it. So I don’t know if it has anything to do with my plugin. Actually, it probably doesn’t, since it runs within the digest-building code.

For what it’s worth, Friday posted only two copies of the digest. I only found one item worth saving, though. (Well, two, but I expanded the other one into this post.)

I guess it still needs some testing. When I’m sure it’s working properly, I’ll post the code.

Update: Check out Version 1.0.

• Rewriting titles to be more meaningful than “Line Items for YYYY-MM-DD”
• Rewriting post slugs for the same reason. (WordPress will remember the old URL and redirect it, so it won’t break incoming links.)
• Adding tags and categories
• Reformatting single-item lists as very short posts.
• Reformatting links and expanding shortened URLs (which I’ve been doing for a while now).
• Pulling the “Powered by Twitter Tools” link from the shortest posts, generally those with only one or two items, so that it doesn’t end up dominating the related-posts data.
• Removing redundant items. No need to keep, for instance, a link to an article when it’s followed by a post with detailed commentary on the same article. Or a link to a phone photo that’s followed by a post embedding the same photo, or one of the same subject taken with a better camera.
• Removing really trivial items. Though I’m not always sure where to draw the line.
• Fixing, replacing, or just dropping dead links.
• Update: Uploading photos to show them inline instead of linked. Especially when the original link is dead.

I’ll be updating a few posts at a time for the next week or so, but it should be manageable once I’m caught up.

Meanwhile, I’ve separated my LiveJournal from my Twitter account. There’s no sense in maintaining two archives of ephemera, so I’ve decluttered my LJ: Any “Line Items” that didn’t have comments are gone, and the few that did now have proper titles, tags, userpics, etc.