Excepting the blog, my site now adheres to the XHTML 1.0 Strict standard.
Pages on this site that pass the standard bear the w3c logo at the bottom.
I will see about getting the blog up to snuff, but since I’m using WordPress, it involves a bit more digging around.
The blog doesn’t look any different, but my site does. The content hasn’t changed but I updated the look and style to bring it up to the standards of modern web browsing. You know, cuz that’s what I do for a living, and I suppose my site should reflect something or other about my mad skillz.
Yes, it still looks hideous. But the way it looks hideous is so much more elegant, and that’s what matters. Style is everything.
Someday I’d like to translate that hideousness over to this blog, but writing css for WordPress is a bit daunting. Until then, let your eyes be grateful for my laziness.
Anyway, please let me know if things are out of whack (you may need to do a [ctrl]+F5 to clear your cache) and I will whack ‘em back in, post-haste.
I hate spammers. I’ve been screwing around with some anti-spam add-ons for this blog, so please accept my apology if you attempted to make a comment but were thwarted, or if you weren’t able to see the blog at all. At one point the anti-spam software was convinced that I was a spammer and I couldn’t even log into my very own blog. My blog had finally turned against me.
And still another apology for this blog itself. I am so very, very sorry.
You may notice things look a bit spruced up. That’s because I spruced things up with the latest version of my blogging software, WordPress.
This is the default template. I may keep it, I think it looks nice. And by nice I mean average and non-threatening. At some point I’ll have to link back to the main site, vegetablesOfTheMind.com. That would, of course, assume that there is anything of value on that site, which there is not. Unless you count my Bush presidential calculator and my base converter (which oddly enough I use fairly often).
Well, enough of my yakkin’. Let’s boogie!
Well I finally got around to updating the links page. Enjoy.
I added some code awhile back to display only the current month’s weblog entries. I did this to save on bandwidth and so that the weblog wouldn’t display an atrociously long page.
While this is handy, things may look awry at the beginning of the month. If there’s nothing for the month yet, a cryptic message says “Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.” Since the casual observer has not entered any criteria, things look broke. Or as we software engineers say, “It done blowed up.”
As is often the case in software, things ain’t broke; they’re simply behaving as expected. Maybe someday I will change the message. Until then I will write some fluff toward the beginning of each month to fill some space. Just like this entry.
I seem to have thwarted the spammers with my extra comment requirements. However, they have found another backdoor: trackbacks. I don’t know what they are but the spammers have used trackbacks as a way to post comments without visiting (or posting to) the comment page.
Today I added some extra protection to the trackback feature of my weblog and so far it seems to have stemmed the flow.
If I ever find Mr. Texas Holdem or Mr. Online Poker he is in for some serious ass-kicking. And a big stinky beer fart.
There’s a part of me that feels that all this is for the good: I need to maintain a secure site and the spammers are simply exposing vulnerabilities. Another part is angry at the principle of the whole thing: I maintain this weblog and as a public service offer the ability for anyone to submit a comment. I don’t want to censor anyone’s comments as I know I can’t grow unless prodded by another viewpoint. The spammers are ruining this functionality for everyone: if I can’t figure out how to stop them, I will have to remove comments altogether and that would be a very sad day indeed. I don’t like having to moderate comments since that discourages an open discussion. Another part of me is annoyed at my blogging software for allowing such easy spammage. While I can’t criticize too much since it’s open source software and I didn’t pay anything for it, at the same time I’m not making money off of it and I’m paying money to have this site hosted.
The Soapbox section has been bugging me for quite some time. Until now, all my soapbox rants were static pages. What this means is that in order to create a new soapbox rant, I needed to create a new .php file containing the rant, ftp it up to this site, and add a link to it on the main soapbox page.
The new and improved version has been integrated with my weblog. Now all I have to do is log in, create a new blog entry, and assign it to the Soapbox category and it will be pulled up by the menu at the left. No need to ftp or create & modify files. See, technology does save us time and trouble after all!
Minor tweaks to the layout of the site. The textual content area has a lighter color and I changed the font. I hope this makes things more readable.
