Trivia that matter
I’m tired of seeing this
and this
whenever I want to edit a post or check statistics. I plan to move my websites elsewhere soon. WordPress currently recommends Bluehost, DreamHost, MediaTemple and Laughing Squid. Does anyone have any experience with any of them? Thumbs up or thumbs down?
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After seeing the same henshin sequences recycled endlessly in typical mahou shoujo series, I’m not particularly scandalized by this:
Let’s see if this media player works for .ogg files:
According to Steven,
… there’s something wrong with your page that makes IE pop up a “stack overflow” error every time I load it.
Hmm. TKM works fine for me in Safari and Firefox, and if there’s any dodgy code in the WordPress template or plugins, I didn’t spot it when I skimmed through the files (not that it would be obvious to my non-expert eyes). Has anyone else had problems with this page recently? If so, what symptoms did you observe and what browsers did you use?
I spent most of the weekend installing and tweaking a new theme. It looks fine in my main browser, but I just discovered that in Safari, there are suddenly ads on my site when you click on links to particular stories. Expect more changes.
Update: Fixed.
I spent most of the weekend installing and tweaking a new theme. It looks fine in my main browser, but I just discovered that in Safari, there are suddenly ads on my site.
I’ll see if I can root out the offending code this evening, but the chances are that I’m going to be looking for a different theme. Don’t worry; Pyun and Potaru will remain.
Update: It turned out to be an easy fix. I just needed to delete a few lines in three of the .php files.
Can you see the mp3 player?
How about this one?
If you don’t see either player, click on the title of this post to open it in its own page, and see if that makes a difference.
Can you see the mp3 player?
How about this one?
I post a lot of music on my other weblog, and recently I’ve been receiving reports that the music players are not appearing on the page. I wonder if that’s a problem here, too, since this also runs on WordPress.
Odds and ends in lieu of a substantative post.
My ankle has healed to the point that it’s a minor nuisance, not a major problem. It doesn’t feel right, and I expect that it never really will, but I can get around plenty well now, up and down stairs and out on my bicycle. I’m done with formal physical therapy. Next month I plan to take a beginning ballet class as a form of advanced PT. I don’t expect to be back on the dance stage again — my ankle is getting better, but my knees aren’t — but taking class will be worthwhile just to demonstrate to myself that I can still do it, despite everything.
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I’ve installed a new photo gallery that I hope will be easier to upgrade in the future when it becomes necessary. I’m in the process of uploading the pictures from the old site. There are a bunch of them, and it’s going to take a while to post them all. Currently, there are some pictures from last year’s Walnut Valley Festival, some from the local botanical garden, and a selection of pictures from my days in the Society for Creative Anachronism. The last are mostly black and white and date back to when I worked in an old-fashioned chemical darkroom.
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Robert the LLama Butcher, one of my favorite bloggers, has his own place now, The Port Stands at Your Elbow. He promises to keep posting at the old site as well.
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Watchmen is one of the very few comic books graphic novels that I have read. The inevitable movie is due out next year, and it looks like it might not be a botch — though it almost was:
… they originally wanted Keanu Reeves for Dr. Manhattan, Ron Perlman for The Comedian, and either Jude Law and Tom Cruise for Ozymandias. Gack!
Toren makes an essential point in the comments there:
Alan has put his money where his mouth is and transferred all his share of the profits from the movie to Dave Gibbons, the artist. I’ve met Dave a few times here and in England and I must say he’s not only a great guy but his work in adapting Alan’s brutally difficult script has been vastly underrated. To take Alan’s insanely complex and dense scripts and adapt them to read fluently and yet contain the unbelievable amount of required detail and foreshadowing is one of comic’s great accomplishments. Dave’s work was hugely appreciated within the industry but alas, never got much credit outside of it. It was all “Alan Moore is God.”
It’s a damn shame.
Alan Moore isn’t God, but is he Shakespeare? Eve Tushnet has some interesting things to say about Watchmen (spoilers), finding parallels with Measure for Measure and much else. (You may need to scroll down to the entries for January 23, 2004.) Scroll up for additional comments and links.
Update: More on Moore from Tushnet.
I’m going to be away from the computer for a few days, so things here will be even quieter than usual.
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It’s going to be about two months more and another operation before I have two working legs again. This is just a wee bit frustrating. I’d like to take more pictures, but until I can get down the front steps unaided, there’s no point to getting the camera out. I suppose I could do series of photos of my books, or my vinyl, or the unwashed dishes, or the junk mail an inch deep on the front room floor, but I don’t think there’s two months worth of interesting shots there. I’m considering renting or buying a folding wheelchair and bribing friends to take me out to the botanical garden (which will shortly become a very active site) and other interesting places, but even then that’s something I can’t do every day. It looks like Project 365 will stay on hold until April.
My left ankle, early Wednesday afternoon.
Project 365 is on hold while my ankle heals. Posting here in general will probably be sporadic until I can get around more easily.
Wednesday evening.
Shamus Young is the most dangerous sort of guy, with lots of ideas and the time and energy to implement them. He first came to my attention several years ago with The Lemon. Later there was The DM of the Rings. Currently he is one of the parties responsible for Chainmail Bikini. His most recent effort is a WordPress plugin, “Wavatars,” which I’ve installed here. If you leave a comment, your name will be accompanied by an eighty-pixel-square avatar determined by your email address. (If you have a Gravatar, as I do, that’s what you will see instead.) On a weblog like mine where comments are infrequent, these are just a cute novelty, but on sites where comment threads get lengthy, these could be useful for keeping the various writers straight.
If you like the idea but want something a little more macabre for your own site, consider MonsterID. (Via Aziz.)
According to the statistics counter, nobody has visited here since Friday afternoon. Now this site only gets a small fraction of the traffic that my other weblog does, but I seriously doubt that nobody at all has been here. More likely upgrading to the most recent version of WordPress broke the counter. If you should stop by here today, I’d appreciate it you leave a comment saying so, so I will know that the plugin isn’t working. Thank you.
Update: Thank you all for commenting. The statistics plugin definitely isn’t working, so I’ve disabled it for now.
If this works, it’s goodbye to Bad Behavior.
The recent daily pictures will be posted once I have a chance to go throough them all. There are about 2,500 of them to glance at.
Later this weekend I hope to fix the other problems with this weblog. I upgraded to the most recent version of WordPress. It didn’t fix the problem, but it did break the template. Whoopee.
Later: I think I’ve got it all straightened out now, and I’ve loaded the header image folder with my own photos.
I’ve just redirected the tancos2.net domain name to point to the same nameservers as tancos.net. The change will take a few days to propagate, but soon all the links to my old sites will either be redirected here or return 404s. You will still be able to visit the old sites for a few weeks more by substituting “tancos2.pmachinehosting.com” for “tancos2.net” in the URLs. However, I am cancelling my old host before the next service renewal in October, and after that the old sites will be gone. If you’ve been coming here by way one of my old pages and you want to keep track of my obsessions, this is your cue to update your links.
New poll
By a vote of seven to four, readers here declared Dolores Umbridge to be more evil than Bellatrix Lestrange. (Readers of my other weblog declared Umbridge to be the more loathsome, eleven to zero.)
There’s a new poll up in the sidebar now: which is more evil, Microsoft or Sony?
I discovered that there is already a weblog named Days of grass, days of straw. Therefore, I’m going to look for another name. I’ll be skimming through Lafferty, Gene Wolfe and Cordwainer Smith when I have time during the next few days to see what sounds right and hasn’t been taken. (There already is an Alpha Ralpha Boulevard, grrr.) In the meantime, this will be a weblog without a name.