Reenigne blog

I've been doing a little spring-cleaning of the old blog now that I've started writing in it again. I installed the WP-Syntax and WP LaTeX plugins and went back through my old posts to prettify up the code blocks and equations. I think I've got most of them (with the exception of a few bits of code that are in languages that I made up, so the plugin doesn't understand them, and a few odd here and there).

There are so many LaTeX and syntax highlighting plugins available for WordPress, though - I have no idea if the ones I'm using are the best. I ended up just using the "most popular" search on the WordPress plugins page and picked the first results for "syntax" and "latex" that looked like they would do what I wanted, on the theory that the most popular ones would be the best. They seem to work well enough but I do worry a bit that at some point I will find they're missing some important feature and I'll have to switch plugins and go back and update all my old posts again.

I also went back and fixed any typos and mistakes in equations that I noticed while doing the updates, and updated with new developments such as the mention of the Eclipse of Mars illusion in The undiscovered colour and the 75 ohm load in CRTC emulation for MESS.

I also want to change my theme (Default is okay but I think it belies how much work I put into this thing). I'll probably change it to Twenty Eleven with a custom header unless someone with better design taste than me has a better suggestion. I need to find a better way to do centering of large images as well. The current way still mostly works but occasionally collides with the links over on the right, and there's a lot of pictures without the correct stylesheet class. I also want to fix the ordered list style - I'd much prefer nice round bullets to those chevrons.

To make the banner I wanted to take a big pile of pictures that I had made especially for blog entries and just sort of stick them all together at random in a big jumbled collage with some nice blending between them. I thought it would be easy to find software to do this but there's about a million "collage maker" programs, almost all of them "trial-ware" and all of them completely useless for the purpose. It seems that to do a jumbled collage in any of them I'd have to individually add, place and rotate each picture. I found one with a wizard that did an automatic layout with blending, but you can't change the blend radius to anything other than "hardly noticeable at all", the pictures are forced into a grid layout and the program is buggy anyway (and won't let you save in the trial version, but doesn't seem to mind you taking a screenshot of the finished result).

So I think I'm going to write my own automatic collage maker. Shouldn't be too hard, and that way it'll be easy to update the header as I add new images.

One other thought that came to mind as I was going through all my old posts - this blog used to be a lot more picture heavy than it is at the moment. I have a big backlog of pictures (over 2 years worth) that I do eventually want to put up here - I'll probably do a month a day at some point. Most of our pictures these days are taken by Gennie, though, and she tends to put them up on her flickr. There will be some overlap with that, though I don't think I'll be including all the food pictures here (I know I have in the past but that was before Gennie started using flickr).

Recently, I got a piece of blogspam emploring me to turn off "no follow" on my comment links in order to increase my blog's readership. The "rel='nofollow'" attribute on a link (for those who don't know) means "I do not endorse this link - it was added by a user of the site, and may be spammy in nature", and is used by search engines (Google in particular) to mean that it should not contribute to the linked page's pagerank.

My first reaction was revulsion that spammers would use such a down-right dirty tactic. But then I realised that if spammers are doing this, it means that nofollow is working - it's getting harder to get non-nofollow links to your site via spam, and therefore harder to fraudulently increase your pagerank. This is a very good thing for bloggers because if spamming blogs is no longer effective, it will stop. So (in order to counteract any damage that this "disable nofollow" spam might do, I encourage bloggers and operators of other sites where users can add links to ensure that the "rel='nofollow'" attribute is placed on all links that you haven't personally checked and endorsed. It has no effect either way on your readership (only producing quality content that people want to read can do that) but it makes the efforts of spammers useless. Also beware of anyone coming out of the blue and wanting you to link to their site (even if they're offering reciprocal linking) - chances are they're SEO spammers.

Sometimes I'll be really proud of a blog post after having written it, but then when it comes time to actually post it I'll cringe a bit to remember it (especially if there's anything at all controversial in it). The feeling usually goes away (at least mostly) when I re-read the post and it isn't as confrontational or embarrasing as I remembered it but sometimes I just have to grit my teeth and post anyway. There have been times when I have just pulled posts altogether though - either because I no longer agree with what I wrote or because I want to find a better form to put those thoughts in. Perhaps someday I'll come back to those posts and see if they can be resurrected in some form or other.

I have a 70 day blog backlog (at time of writing, 44 at time of posting), meaning that even if I don't write anything for 6 weeks you'll still get a post every day before I run out. So far I have been operating this backlog as a FIFO queue which seems to work pretty well. The only problem is, though, that now if I write something it might be quite out-of-date by the time it's posted. This discourages me from writing about current events. Perhaps I should let the backlog drain (by posting faster than I write if necessary) and then post as articles come into my head like most people do.

I think I finally figured out how to properly center images that are wider than the column (450 pixels). I couldn't seem to get all four cases (image<=450 pixels, image>450 pixels)x(IE, FireFox) working correctly. I finally resorted to using a different image class for wide images, which looks like this:

img.centerwide {
	display: inline;
	margin-left: -287px;
	margin-right: -287px;
	position: relative;
	align: center;
	text-align: center;
	}

Of course, I'm sure this breaks every web design rule in the book and probably doesn't work for some of the less popular browsers. Oh well, it'll do for now until somebody complains. I really ought to learn about HTML and CSS properly.

I've incorporated all my old website pages (many of which were woefully out of date) into this blog, thus giving me an excuse to leave them out of date (nobody expects old blog posts to be kept up-to-date). There were 80 of them which is more than I would have guessed.

I have no idea when some of the pages were created, so I figured it out the best I could. Please ignore any temporal anomalies you might run into here. Some of the page dates I was able to figure out by looking at the timestamps of images that I created for the page but for a lot of them the only clue was the page's timestamp. So a lot of the pages ended up on the 12th of July 2000, which is probably when I last changed the website's background.

One nice thing about using WordPress for everything is that now (or at least once I update the old pages to redirect to the corresponding blog pages) the entire site validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional! Woo-hoo standards compliance!

I might still go back and edit old posts from time to time. Hey, it's my website - I can do what I like with it. I'll try to remember to delete any comments that such edits render incorrect. So if you notice a broken link, spelling mistake, factual error or some other update which you think I should make to an old post, feel free to comment on the post in question.