Jason Crowther’s Blog

Yeah, figured it was finally time to update to the latest wordpress. After enjoying all the enhancements on the wordpress blogs we use at work, I thought they might encourage me to work on my blog some more.

The update wasn’t quite as scary as I thought it would be. Its basically the same as the famous 5 minute install, except you copy over the existing install instead of a clean directory and run the updater script instead of the installer.

It did hose my sidebar, but I knew that was coming. I had hacked that code quite a bit to put in all my offsite widgets (delicious, digg, flickr, my runlog, etc.) I’m gonna recode those things into my own custom widgets, so I don’t shoot myself in the foot again.

I’d also like to delve into a look and feel update, but I don’t know if I’m gonna have the time and energy to get anywhere in the near future. Probably go evolutionary instead of revolutionary, I guess. Stay tuned.

I like Wordpress’ management interface, really I do. Well, except for one minor annoyance that’s not really Wordpress’ fault. After typing on a plain old PC keyboard for years and years, I’m addicted to the home and end keys to jump to the start or end of the current line.

Unfortunately, on Mac, the home and end keys don’t work the same. They jump you to the top and bottom of the current text section (basically the same as Control + home/end) does on the PC side.

Hold the phone, seasoned Mac users say. Durr, just use Command + Home/End to jump to the beginning or end of the line. That works fine every where except in Firefox where the browser jumps in and intercepts the key combo for browser forward/back options. Well, thank you very little.

So, I’ve giving Marsedit a shot. I’m liking it so far. Its a little faster than typing in the browser and I’m a little less worried about having to constantly undo code clean-up done automatically every time I save an in progress post.

Doh, just spotted a potential deal breaker for me. Marsedit doesn’t have a way to do lists. Maybe I’m just missing it? Man, that’s rough on a list-a-holic like me.

Stay tuned.

I’ve been watching the post counter in my Wordpress dashboard ticking up. Today is post number 200! Even though it took a while (about 2 and half years), I’m still pretty surprised I’ve stuck with it this long.

Good time to catch up on some of my previous ramblings:

• Running
• My battle to get my TV fixed under an extended warranty
• My growing obsession with apple iPods and computers

I look forward to more blogging fun in the future. Look for an upgrade to Wordpress 2.1 and new theme in the next few weeks.

Thanks to all my readers!

Post headers, footers, and the sidebar headers now have nifty Super Mario Bros. flavor courtesy of the Super Modena Bros. free Icon Delivery from Icon Buffet. I think they perk up the design nicely.

The icons are hooked up as CSS background images. This allows them to be change easily from the external style sheet file without having to change the HTML at all. Handy!

I also changed the goomba in the masthead to use this trick. Previously it was a plain old image. I looked and worked fine, but when Google indexed the page, it grabbed the text in the ALT attribute. So, my search result was “goomba Jason Crowther’s Blog · Flipped the Switch…” Hopefully, the new formatting should fix that.

In an effort to push past $0.00 in ad revenue, I hooked my adsense again. Maybe someone will click one someday.

A while back on my former pivot blog, I said I was migrating to wordpress. After that, I pretty much gave up on the old site. I was planning on doing a fancy schmancy site overhaul to coincide with the blog engine cut over, but I can never seem to find the time to work on it.

None-the-less, I’ve been blogging all along, so if you’ve only been watching my old site, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by a bunch of new posts. Please take a second to update your rss feed reader to point my new feed.

Some of the sections from the old site have been replaced by 3rd part sites (ie, pictures are on flickr, links are on del.icio.us.) Some sections have yet to be moved (running log and poetry.) Hopefully, over the next few weekends I’ll get all that stuff cleaned.

If this is the first time you’ve seen the new look and feel, please let me know what you think!