Feed Changes

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As promised before, I have aggregated my relevant content from various sites to one Feedburner feed to rule them all, and redirected the old feed URL to that. Apologies to anyone who suddenly got hundreds of new items from my site feed because of the redirect. I failed to consider that every entry from the new feed location would come up as new and unread in feed readers, and while I can’t really control what your feed readers mark as “new,” I should have given advance warning of a potential flood. Sorry about that.

If you would rather get content from only this site, or if you want to engorge yourself from a firehose of content, refer to the feed page .

Site Changes

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Notice anything different? I’ve moved the site over to Axishost, upgraded to Movable Type Open Source (the latest version, 4.21, up from 3.36), and redesigned stuff.

Inside pages, which were already pretty minimal to begin with, are now even more simplified, with extraneous lines removed and titles devolved into breadcrumb blocks. I’ve also adjusted my use of type with a mind towards mobile users, using a container block width and larger font size which should make reading easier on devices like Nokia tablets and iPhones, without needing pinchy zooming or horizontal scrolling.

Randomizing layouts are off for the moment and the weblog runs on the same template as inside pages while I think about how best to redo the main index with action streams. Meanwhile, a Friendfeed embed will suffice. I’m also going back to a single-column sidebar for simplicity’s sake.

This will all take me a while to get back down to. When you work in code full time, sometimes the last thing you want to come home to is more code.

Vote

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Voting Amy and I will not be voting tomorrow, because we already absentee-voted last week, in expectation of a very busy Nov 4th. However, I do strongly encourage all US citizens to go vote on Nov 4th if you haven’t yet, and know that I endorse Barack Obama for president. I would like him in the presidency because he favors net neutrality, increased funding for rail travel and public transit, voting representation for the District of Columbia, a balanced approach between private and socialized healthcare, better environmental protection, fewer abortions while maintaining choice, an end to unnecessary war, and voluntary pulling-up of pants by brothers. He has shown himself a steady, even-tempered, and experienced politician of distinct eloquence, deep thought, and profound managerial acumen, and would go far in rebuilding the USA’s standing in the world.

Check out these reasons to vote Obama from South Carolina-to-Pennsylvania transplant Fairly Ordinary, West Coast Calvinist libertarian Nowhere “The Dane” sville, East Coast libertarian home-schooler Chris O’Donnell, and some general guy.

Stuff That Needs Doing

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  • Get off this default template and restore randomizing layouts.
  • Redirect current feed URLs to FeedBurner.
  • Get an underscores-to-hyphens RewriteRule into .htaccess.
  • Restyle inside pages.
  • Make a Page Entry Index template.
  • Make a new 404 page.
  • Go back to single-column weblog sidebar.
  • Redo blogroll as parsed Google Reader OPML subscription list.
  • Install Action Streams, consolidated into flow of main weblog if possible.
  • Tag eight years of archive weblog entries.

That is all.

I just finished installing Movable Type 4!

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I’ve finally migrated the site to a new web host and upgraded to Movable Type Open Source 4.21. I’ve always intended this next server move to be the impetus for a reboot of the site, and I’m very much a start-from-scratch kind of person, so things will be very raw and bare-bones and default-y for a bit. This presents me with an opportunity to brush up on my Movable Type templating skills, and rethink and clean up various aspects of HNBP’s back and frontend architecture. For now please bear with the mess and tell me if you see anything that needs fixing.

Actually, you know what, don’t tell me. I know and I’m on it.

Just for posterity and amusement, I’ll keep MT’s default first-post text and comment around:

Welcome to my new blog powered by Movable Type. This is the first post on my blog and was created for me automatically when I finished the installation process. But that is ok, because I will soon be creating posts of my own!

Rainy Saturday

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Big Drop

Drops of water on plants in the Smithsonian’s Mary Livingston Ripley Garden. Shortly after I took these photos it began pouring again and did not stop for the rest of the afternoon. We took shelter in the Sackler Gallery, where we looked at Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur.

Willow Oak Root

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Macro details from the knotty, mossy roots of a willow oak on the Capitol Lawn. Note the whorl-like patterns under the bark on exposed portions of the root system:

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Caturday!

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Just testing out time lapse video on the SD1100IS. As always, music is thrown together from Garageband loops.

Another Talking Head

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Discreetly recorded with my Nokia 6120c’s secondary front camera while heading home earlier this evening. I paused and unpaused as people passed by so as not to appear weird, talking to no one on a video phone. Later in the show you can see how tired I get from the walk and the crowd, around when I pass by a freestyle-rapping street evangelist with a megaphone.

(I briefly flirted with naming my Youtube video blog “Another Talking Head, Entertainment-Indigent, Spouting Mundanities,” or A.T.H.E.I.S.M. — but that would have sent some seriously mixed signals. But it’s clever, isn’t it? I’m so clever.)