Maintenance post. The new gallery will be up in the next few days. In the meantime, decided I could do without 80mb of gallery software cluttering up my webspace.

Apologies for the lack of posting the past month or so. As you can see, I’ve merged Wandering Ways and Critical Games into one blog, and will be moving forward from there. There’s still a great deal to do before all the kinks are worked out, but I felt that with WordPress 2.5 now out, it was time to finally put the new design up and through its paces.

Things that are still on my TODO:

• remove the Gallery2 installation, swap it out with a ZenPhoto install
• install Vanilla
• finish theme tweaks, update links and blogrolls
• finish cleaning up the site backend
• start posting some more (for realz)

Anyway, more later!

This is a body of text meant to act as a body of text for testing out a web template. It is going to contain a number of notable elements, not the least of which is blockquotes, ordered lists, unordered lists, links, code snippets, abbreviations, and citations. This is so I can see how they all look in an actual page.

This is a body of text meant to act as a body of text for testing out a web template. It is going to contain a number of notable elements, not the least of which is blockquotes, ordered lists, unordered lists, links, code snippets, abbreviations, and citations. This is so I can see how they all look in an actual page. Block of text, Nabil Maynard

WYSIWYG

Test
1. Get Milk
2. Get Bread
3. Get million dollars

Second Test
• Ninjas
• Pirates
• Robots

Hello, World!
More code.
Who ever heard of a 3 line program?
Blah!


Okay, and now back to real text. This was only a test. If it were a real post, it might actually be useful, and we can’t have THAT, now can we?

So, I’ve started posting song reviews as planned (just a few days later than expected), and I’m feeling pretty good about it. I’d like to hear people’s thoughts about the format, and just in general if you like it as an addition to the site. In the process of doing those, I thought a bit about the site itself, and ended up tweaking it a little bit. I changed the font to Helvetica (if you don’t have Helvetica, it’ll show up as Verdana as before), increased the font size slightly, and added some letter spacing… the spacing is a bit wider than I’d like, but it’s still readable, and will have to do until I can really look at how different browsers handle fractional pixel widths (the spacing is currently 1px, so to get it closer than that, I’d need to get into decimals, and mucking with Safari, I honestly didn’t notice a real difference between 0 and .5px… nor did I see a difference when using percentages). I’m going to sit with it for a while and see how I like the new spacing, and if I get any votes seriously in favor or against, I’ll probably let that make the final decision. If you’re reading this via RSS, you probably don’t care, and that’s fine. I just want to make it more readable for those who are coming to the actual site.

Oh, I also increased the line-height from 1.2em to 1.3em, and I think it gives a nice boost to readability. It’s amazing how that small a change can make such a difference. No other maintenance stuff for now… one of these days, I need to get around to the 2.2 update. They finally integrated widgets directly into the code, and that could potentially be nice.

So, yeah, please let me know how you feel about the changes/additional content!

First off: Happy Birthday, Erica.

Second: I just updated Critical Gallery to Gallery 2.2. It went off mostly without a hitch. The new WebDAV module they added mixed with URL Rewrite caused a really weird bug that made anything starting with a w not load. Took me a while to figure out that’s what it was. Until they patch it, I just changed the webdav rewrite prefix to an actual word instead of ‘w’. I’m sampling a new theme for my part of the gallery (Mickey’s welcome to set up hers however she wants, what’s there now seems to work fine and I know better than to meddle), which in a lot of ways I like a lot more, though I do definitely have it set up for wider screens than not at this point. It’ll still fit on a 1280 width with room to spare, though, so I don’t really care.

If you want to leave comments, please feel free, but be aware that you need to create an account first. You also get to view larger resolution versions of the images in the process, so I do definitely recommend it.

I won’t say that it’s done (because it’s not… there are still several things I need to turn on or otherwise set up), but the majority of work is completed. I did all of the work offline using MAMP on my laptop in coffee shops and hotel rooms, including redoing the header graphic (same original image, same concept, just tweaked differently). If you notice anything wonky, let me know, please: I’ve tested the new design in Safari, Camino, Firefox, and Opera, and it seems to function properly (you will, however, need JavaScript turned on in order to make use of the date archives on the sidebar), but I haven’t checked it in IE6 or 7 (mostly through a reluctance to boot into my Windows partition). In the process, I also upgraded WordPress to 2.1, which was a smooth process as usual.

The new design uses several plugins, though small: Smart Archives, Fancy Archives, Autometa, and Google Analytics. I’ll probably re-add Word Stats and some pagination and excerpt handling plugins in the near future as well.

So, yeah… hope you like the new design. If you want to use it for your site, let me know and I’ll zip it up along with some notes on which things you’ll need to specifically change for your own blog. Feedback would be appreciated!

Neat little WordPress plugin called Word Stats, found via Raph Koster:

Just a quick heads up to those who don’t check often: Critical Gallery has been updated. I’m not done uploading images, but there is a PILE there that weren’t there before for those interested. Mickey’s gallery is still up and functional (and will remain so as long as she wants it), but the wedding gallery is no longer live. My battery is dead, so that’s all for now!