Using a new theme

I’ve been using the “White as Milk” theme here for a long time but switched today to “Tarski.” Which, of course, meant I reconfigured the sidebars again. But that’s why I have this blog — so I can play around with it.

While the versions of these themes built into the WordPress.com system are quite nice, neither is as flexible or, probably, as up to date as they are if installed into a hosted website. Which is a pity but, then again, the whole thing is free. And I can live with that for now.

If I am going to stick with this “Tarski” them then I should upload a custom header image one of these days. On second thought, I’m too lazy for that. I’ll probably just change the theme again.

Having fun with sidebar widgets

Since I’m not writing many posts here (yet!), I decided to add and rearrange sidebar widgets today. While I started the task to simply play with the new features of WordPress 2.7, the whole activity wound up adding quite a bit of new content, albeit aggregated, to each page.

While I knew vaguely about one of those newfangled widgets for RSS, it didn’t occur to me until today that (duh!) because my tumblelog and Twitter page have RSS feeds, I could simply include their content here without any complicated (or prohibited) plugins. My only explanation — just stupid, I guess.

Anyway, the site is suddenly much more “lively” to me. And that’s a good thing because maybe I’ll spend more time here.

Happy anniversary

It’s been exactly one year since my last post. Golly, where does the time go?

While I was away, Senator Barack Obama, the subject of that last post, went from candidate to nominee to president. Wow! Still hard to believe sometimes. Looks like I made the right call voting for him. Yes we did, yes we did.

But my dreams of starting a new period of public and prolific writing somehow didn’t come to pass. At all. Even with a state of the art publishing system this time, I didn’t write anything. Nada. Zip. At least on this blog. Apparently I did write quite a bit on Twitter and, for awhile, my tumblelog.

Rather than blame writer’s block, I’ve finally realized my problem is simply that I have a short attention span. That’s it. I just like to move from hobby to hobby to hobby. A common malady but it makes for poor content here. I would worry about it more if I had readers to offend but I haven’t earned any yet. Who knows, maybe that will change if I ever write anything again.

See you next year.

The unsafe choice

My political affiliation is not normally defined by party lines. Although I was raised Republican, registering as one was not due to ideology, but simply out of respect for my maternal grandfather.

Over the years I’ve voted for Republicans. But I’ve also voted for candidates from other parties, and I’ve put my mark on plenty of ballot measures inconsistent with any one political party’s point of view. I’m not some high-minded iconoclast, but I no longer trust well-funded herds filled with well-meaning idealogues. In the late ’90s I registered nonpartisan.

But slowly my politics have changed. Seven years of the Bush administration will do that to you. We’re all familiar with the crimes of our executive so there’s no need to repeat them here. I’m now a partisan. And I’m convinced that we must empty the White House of these so-called Republicans. Otherwise this country and the Republican party itself is lost.

In November, I want the Democratic presidential candidate to win the day. And the safe choice for me is to back the leading Democrat in the primaries, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Senator Clinton has a stunning grasp of public policy. She’s experienced, respected, connected and predictable. I believe she really wants to serve this country and I have no doubt she would make a capable president. She’s also plenty able to fight dirty with Senator John McCain, the likely Republican nominee.

And then there’s Barack Obama.

Senator Obama is possibly the finest orator running for president in almost 50 years. And his words have galvanized a whole new electorate. He’s got proven judgement and a willingness to work our desired policies across party lines. He’s just obviously different. I have no doubt he would bring massive change to Washington.

And, unlike Hillary Clinton, he stands in stark contrast to John McCain. Without any dirty tricks, Obama’s right-from-the-start position on the Iraq war can bring McCain down.

Obama has some momentum and is pulling close, but Clinton is still way ahead in most polls and will have the most delegates after Super Tuesday. Why prolong the inevitable and give McCain an edge? Even though Obama is the most capable, isn’t Clinton a perfectly acceptable candidate?

Maybe. But that just doesn’t feel right. I’ve got to take a chance. When the polls open later this morning, I’m voting for Barack Obama.

Yes, I can.

Hello? Hello! Is this thing on?

This is the first post to my “other blog.” Where is my primary blog? That’s a difficult question to answer since it both no longer exists and doesn’t exist yet. And sort of exists now in a different format.

Yeah, I know that was confusing. Let me explain.

Years ago I started a blog on my own hosted domain. I would blog in spurts, sometimes with multiple posts per day, sometimes going weeks without publishing anything new. I was the typical, easily-distracted, part-time blogger.

At first I published that blog using Movable Type and then I migrated it to WordPress, experimenting with Textpattern briefly somewhere in the middle there. I just love to tinker.

Never happy with the output from any of those systems, I wrote my own Perl hack based loosely on Blosxom. Only 275 lines of code, it required me to upload specially formatted and time-stamped text files to my remote server via the command line in order to publish a post. That’s right, I’m a Web geek and I had created a content management system without a Web interface.

Wait, it gets stupider. Because I was plagued with comment spam using the other systems, I left that feature out of mine entirely. This meant that my custom blogging system was not only a pain in the ass to use but it completely removed any participation by readers.

None of that seemed to matter at first because it produced such beautiful markup! I don’t just mean the outward appearance of the page, the hidden page source itself was beautiful — as if it was hand-written by someone who really cared about indenting and whitespace. I was convinced the RSS feed was a work of art.

Of course, no one ever looked at the source. Duh. All this pointless vanity led to a severe case of blog rot. And last year I only made a single post, which is only half as many as the year before.

Eventually I realized that if I ever wanted to write with any regularity again, I would have to do it elsewhere. So I “paved over” my blog’s domain, hiding it cleverly inside and making sure any external links to individual posts wouldn’t break. Then I purchased a new vanity domain and started experimenting with the latest versions of all those content management systems I had abandoned years earlier.

After a few weeks of tinkering I knew that I was in danger of falling into my old habits and never publishing anything. That’s why I created a a tumblelog at Tumblr to scratch my writing itch. Effectively, it’s been my primary blog even though it’s mostly links and none of the posts are over 200 words. So far, I’ve posted something there every day.

I finally decided to use WordPress at my new hosted website, but I still haven’t yet figured out which plugins, theme and various options I really want for that system. Once again I’m tinkering and it’s taking far longer than I intended to get my primary blog ready and online. Which explains this, my “other blog,” at WordPress.com. And it’ll be good practice posting here since both sites will be using, more or less, the same system.

However, I don’t intend to abandon this blog or my tumblelog once my primary blog is online. Perhaps the purpose of this blog will change when that happens. I don’t know. In the meantime, I’ll post here about all of my tinkering as well as whatever else interests me at the moment. You’re invited to read along and comment.