Jason Crowther’s Blog

You may have noticed that I’m finally getting around to tweaking the look and feel. I stumbled on some nice Super Mario Bros. themed icons in my Icon Buffet Free Delivery a while back. The idea is kinda neat, they give you starter sets of icons free to get the word out. You can then trade the sets between your friends. If you sign up and are looking for a particular set, I’ve been in the program a while and have a bunch.

I put a goomba in my header and as my favicon (that’s the icon before my url in the location bar; you’ll also see it next my site if you bookmark me.) Here’s a handy little png to ico converter that helped me get the transparency part right. Sweet!

Spent a few hours over the weekend tuning up my blog content.  I’ve gone through a recategorized all the posts (so not everything appears in the default category.)  Hopefully, that should reading stuff like my running updates a little easier.

I also fixed a problem in some of the older posts that had newline characters in random places.  I’m not quite sure if that was caused by a bug in the my former blog softwares RSS feed generator or in Wordpress’ RSS import gadget.  Oh well, I don’t care, it was easy enough to fix.

I’m slowly but surely getting up to speed on hacking Wordpress. Today, I added some quick running stats to my side bar. Just about as easy as it gets. I made it so my run log database manager program prints the desired content to a file. Then I just call it in the Wordpress sidebar.php file using a php include. Sweet!

As you may have noticed already, on the navibar to the left, you can now find my del.icio.us links and flickr photos. Hooking up both of them was so easy, I’ve all but forgotten about coding up my own homebrew tools.

I’m in the process of evaluating some other blog engines (textpattern, Wordpress, Movable Type) at the moment. Pivot just isn’t doing it for me any more. After that spam email fiasco a while ago, I’m leary of allowing comments even if I update to the latest greatest pivot. The other guys have some fancier comment spam blocking that might make moderation less of a hassle. Keep you posted as things evolve.

Ok, I’m not making any progress on my master plan to reinvent my website. In my grand vision, I’d like to use a single home brew tagging system to cover my blog, links, and photo gallery. But lack of energy and time pushed the delivery date some time into 2010, if make it a rush job at the pace that I’m going.

So, I conceded and decided to try to use del.icio.us to keep track of my links. I actually really liked their idea from the start. My cop out reason for not using them was that I could never remember just where the periods were in their URL. But some time between the last time I checked and now, they made it so you can hit them delicious.com too.

I’ve started the thankless task of moving my bookmarks in. This also gave me a chance to mess around with the new Firefox cousin, Flock. It has direct integration with del.icio.us, flickr and some web blog software (unfortunately, not pivot, though…) Its kinda nice, but I’m not sure its got enough extra stuff to make me switch from vanilla Firefox (which has del.icio.us plug-in of its own). Plus, it has a gesture plugin like Firefox (which I can’t live without); minus, I have to configure it to use my gestures and the configuration interface is pretty different.

To start, I’ve published my running routes, a task that’s been on my to-do list forever. I’m already liking del.icio.us’s neat feature that gives you easy type and remember URL’s like http://del.icio.us/jasoncrowther/routes. That’s a feature I’ll have to borrow when I get around to my home brew tag thingy eventually.

Over the next weeks, I’m gonna try to move the rest of my links in. We’ll see if I still like it after the first couple of hundred links…