Tag: CSS

Mud Pack, Scrub

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: < 1 min

Something cathartic in stealing a couple of workblocks as a sabbatical dwindles to reface a website, update a blog, wade deep into the head-clearing work of CSS tuning. It’s every bit as much the work-in-progress it ever was, but even if it remains an unfinished mess, it is a more up-to-date unfinished mess, now living at http://www.derekmueller.net/. I didn’t have patience for an original rebuild, so I fetched a template from Pixelarity, customized it a bit, touched up the CSS, dropped it into place. Feeling pretty good about having decluttered some what had too long been lingering at the old site.

Web front April 2016
Browser Screenshot, webfront using customized Polaris template from Pixelarity.

Restyling 2

/ Derek Mueller / 1 Comment
⏳ Approximate reading time: < 1 min

Spent a few hours this weekend restyling the blog. I’m almost satisfied with the new front page. The internal pages and archives will have to wait. They’re still functional because they pull from the style sheet, but I have to shift attention to the other, more pressing work I’m doing this summer or it will mount into a punishing backlog. More about that soon.

The latest design makes better use of Cron rebuilds. I’ve installed MT-Twitter (Brandon Fuller, I.O.U. $10), created a blog to archive the activity stream, and then ported that blog’s contents to the EWM front page using the multiblogs feature. I’m still on the fence about Twitter. Not sure I will do anything worthwhile with it (I haven’t adjusted to the different signal-noise ratio, and I’m not certain I want to). But I have an archiving process in place, just in case.

I also created a new logo, new banner, and new favicon a couple of weeks ago. Is. helped me, which explains the spectrum of yellows. And then I dumped some of the clutter (calendar, Google Reader shared items, etc.) and shortened the horizontal navigation bar by making better use of a thin above-banner menu with various app icons. I customized the graphics for the search form, too, but I might redo those when I have the chance, make them slightly smaller. I’m not satisfied with the banner, but I plan to return to that and the other unchecked tasks later on.

If you have any impressions (wow! or sux!), I’d love to hear them. It’s still very much a work-in-progress, but I’ve tried to make the most of since it’s also a way to avoid my other, more pressing work in progress.

Up- or Down- A Grade is a Slope

/ Derek Mueller / 1 Comment
⏳ Approximate reading time: 3 mins

It was upgrade weekend for the blog, meaning I had my eyes turned under the
hood and my fingers in the blog code Friday into Saturday (today, all reading,
responding, and figuring grades).

I was running MT3.2, growing every day more envious of those who were putting
to use the tagging features built into 3.3+. The upgrade was a cinch.
Just FTPed the files into place and logged in. The config file didn’t need
any changes. Well, it didn’t require any changes, that is, until I also
converted the database from MySQL4 to MySQL5. For that, I had to add a
DBSocket line to the config file. I had not a clue about it at the time,
but the support folks at icdsoft.com are remarkably good.

That’s a hearty new cumulus tagcloud over at the left. There’s a lot to
be said for MT’s tagging features built into the latest versions. Now I can merge
tags across the entire weblog, sort by tags (for editing or adding new companion
tags), and grade the tags with a max="x" setting. That’s the statement I use
to come up with ten levels for the tag cloud. And I’ve set the CSS to
display:none for the bottom five (#6-10). That way only the top five levels show
up, and the cloud isn’t the size of Lake Michigan.

Continue reading →

Restyling

/ Derek Mueller / 2 Comments
⏳ Approximate reading time: 2 mins

Everything I know about CSS I learned from experimenting with Movable Type.
And you may or may not care that I’ve never upgraded.  EWM is vintage MT
2.65.  I’ve installed new versions of MT for other folks (another install
just a few days ago, in fact), but I’ve never gotten around to upgrading my own
weblog.  Could be the lag reflects my felt knowledge that the new version
would come with a slightly different set of class and id tags.  No hurry to
bother with it.

Continue reading →

One Blog, Two Blog

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: < 1 min

[Thinking about the trackback feature.]

Got the second blog working. It was, as the interface told me, a permissions error. Once I reset the permissions to the second blog’s folder, it all came together swimmingly. The other blog will be used this spring for a freshman course on technology and writing centered on Neil Postman’s Technopoly. His doomsday-ish tome will send us on our ever-digitized way.

The course is described as a research writing course. I’ve taught it a time or two; even developed an online format for accelerated delivery in just eight weeks. So I’m comfortable with the pace and workload. Just eleven students have enrolled so far, and the new semester starts happening Monday.

I’m having lunch today with my friend and colleague Andy who does a fine job keeping rhetorica.net in masterful form. He promised (well, er, suggested) a brief MT tutorial. Maybe he knows how I can craft a new CSS for this blog. After all, this design is dreadful. We’re jetting along on content, kid.

Oh, and about content. I still don’t have a deliberate schema. The category feature imposes a kind of coherence to this space, and I already feel a deep, quiet wariness that I’m chasing abstraction and glossing conceptual at the expense of attracting any passing readers.

I’m still working out the features, scratching my head about how to do this and that. The time stamp on yesterday’s post was off, for example. Like this witchy-cold weather we’re having in the heartland, it’ll get better.