I've gone ahead and cleaned up the site, switching to a customized K2 theme that I've been working on myself with much thanks to Paul's excellent K2 customization guides. From my limited experience working with other themes and now with K2, I find K2 much easier to work with. There's only one CSS file to edit and I feel a lot more comfortable making changes to it.
I've also gotten rid of the Stand Up lyrics, which had no place on the site, let alone on the main page. The album's been out for over a year now and official lyrics are available on the band's site.
It's always going to be a work in progress, but I think I've now built a good base to start from. I've always been hesitant to keep things simple, always wanting to put more on the front page, but now I want to really scrutinize every little thing I put on the main page and whether it belongs there or not.
It may soon be time to switch The Blog That Jane Likes over to something other than the default Kubrick theme, but its been working fine without any real customization, so I'll focus on this blog more.
Technorati Tags: K2, Wordpress, blogging, design, customization, CSS, HTML, themes
The DMB summer tour starts tomorrow and so does 60GB of FLAC and SHN concert downloads over the summer. On Windows, there are WinAmp plugins for playing SHN and FLAC files, but on the Mac we've been stuck with the now-defunct MacAmp Lite. I've always had problems getting it to play one format or the other and now with an Intel Mac, it being a PowerPC-only binary makes it undesirable to use.
On a quest to solve this little problem, I stumbled across Cog, an open source player for Mac OS X which will play strange formats like Ogg Vorbis and Monkey Audio as well as the usual MP3/AAC/WAV/AIFF and of course, SHN and FLAC.
Best of all, Cog is available as a Universal Binary, meaning that it will run natively on Intel Macs. While playing FLAC and SHN, I've found that Cog uses up less than 10% CPU.
Cog is in constant development, as apparent from their news and recent updates sections, so expect lots of great improvement as time goes on.
Technorati Tags: Cog, audio player, DMB, music, FLAC, SHN, Ogg Vorbis, Monkey Audio, Universal Binary
The new lyrics database written with Ruby on Rails is finally up. I had everything ready to go Friday night, but there were a couple of server configuration things that I had to figure out before the site actually worked. Because of the way it's set up now, you have to add a trailing '/' to the URL or else you'll get an error. I've updated all the links on this page, but you may need to update your bookmarks.
Google has released a pretty robust website stats package called Google Analytics. Straight from the horse's mouth:
Google Analytics tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site.
I've been a bit unhappy with the stats package DreamHost comes with, though granted I don't have much use for it anyway. Installing Analytics was as simple as copying three lines of code into my template, so it's too easy to not try it.
I can't really say much about how it works or the data it reports since no data appears despite them saying it'll be available "within 12 hours." Apparently demand was greater than they expected. I guess that's bound to happen when you release free, easy and useful software and your name is Google. A message on their help page dated (timed?) 5:22 PST states:
Currently, report updating for Google Analytics is experiencing delays. As a result, you may not be seeing any data in your reports even after implementing the Analytics tracking code.
We are currently in the process of updating all reports. You should be able to see these updates in several hours. While this is going on, you may notice different reports updating at different rates. Once this process has completed, all data should be restored to your profiles. Please be assured that this update process has no effect on data collection.
We apologize for any inconvenience. This reporting delay is associated with unexpected demand for Google Analytics. Under normal circumstances, the data in your reports will be at most six hours old.
Technorati Tags: Google, Google Analytics, analytics, AdWords, AdSense, marketing, optimization, statistics, websites
I've added a weighted categories plugin that formats the categories in the sidebar a bit better than the simple categories list Wordpress comes with by default.
I was a bit skeptical about using tags on this blog because I didn't like that long list of categories, but I'm satisfied with this implementation of tags. The circle is now complete.
I've just installed Jeff Minard's modification of Edmundo Hidalgo's Cat2Tag plugin for WordPress to move away from the antiquated categorical organization system to a more flexible tag-based system. I've already been pseudo-tagging my posts using categories in the sense that I've been putting posts in more than one category, but I've been sticking to existing categories since I couldn't previously create categories on-the-fly while writing posts.
As the description for this plugin says, "It’s time to use folksomonies in our blogs, people."
Now if only there was a way to integrate the Technorati tagging plugin with this plugin…
Technorati Tags: blogs, tags, folksonomies, wordpress, plugins
So July is over and my self-imposed blogging goal of 1 post/day wasn't met. I did manage to post 25 entries in 31 days, which almost doubled the 30 entries I had from the previous 6 months. I'd say it was overall successful exercise since I did manage to make relatively substantive posts, sometimes two a day. Suffice to say that if I had this much free time in November, NaNoWriMo would be a breeze. I noticed that I rarely posted over weekends and that I partially made up for that by posting twice almost every day since I announced my goal. It has to be the fact that I'm sitting in front of a computer for 8 hours a day on weekdays that accounts for this trend…
I woke up this morning to find 95 new emails in my inbox. Three of them were random (not spam) emails but the other 92 were blog-related emails. 90 of them were requests for moderation of comments in my 3 and a half month old Flickr post. The other two were comments that slipped through Wordpress' filters and were posted as comments.
The emails were dated (timed?) 7:41am through 8:09am, so all this took place within a half hour. Since it took me less than 5 minutes to clean up and only two comments actually showed up on the site, it just goes to show how futile these spam attacks really are.
Dreamhost is having a promotion where you can get their Crazy Domain Insane Package (the same one I have) for $9 a year. This is the same package I have, with the small exception that I paid $120 for it. All it takes is five easy steps:
- Go to Dreamhost.
- Sign up for the Crazy Domain Insane Package.
- Enter "777" in the special promotions box.
- ???
- Profit!!
For this price, I am very tempted to sign up for another account (which is probably against their ToS). Maybe Veronica would like one, though.
Also, remember to put me down as a referral, I get some cash if you do.
My goal for July is to have an average of 1 post/day. I don't mean to start postwhoring, but this seems like a convenient benchmark to use. I'd like to get my thoughts and experiences out there into the world, not only to share with everyone else, but also to serve as a public collection of personality that I can look back upon in a few years and see how much (or how little) I've changed.
So far I'm at 9 posts in 12 days (including this one), so it looks like I've got some catching up to do.
…
