Some credit for borrowed bits
(Warning: pointless geekery follows.)
The look I chose for this site is called “Simple Sky,” which I found in a big gallery of WordPress themes. It’s really just a CSS file that works on the default WordPress template, which makes installation trivial and upgrades more likely to go smoothly. I tweaked it a bit, but that’s all. It has sensible fonts and Rice-like colors. It would be nice if I could spiff it up a bit with a subtle text-shadow on the headlines, but the time is not yet right.
When I was using Movable Type (from August 2003 to June 2004), I wrote pretty much all of my posts using Zempt, a Windows app, because Movable Type’s web interface irritated me . After a month on WordPress, I haven’t really felt the need for a Windows writing app—the WordPress web interface works just fine. The only thing I miss is a spell-checker. If I used IE then I could use ieSpell, but there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent for Firefox.
A couple of weeks after rearranging the URLs and setting up the 301 redirects, I went through the 404s in the server log looking for things I had missed. I only found three types of URLs there: attempts to exploit bugs in IIS and common CGIs, robots.txt, and favicon.ico. There’s nothing I can do about the IIS/CGI crud, but I did create an empty robots.txt file to make those errors go away. My ability to draw 16×16 icons is an order of magnitude smaller than my ability to draw regular size graphics, which is pretty tiny to begin with, so I just stole one from the Iconfactory. Actually their terms permit this sort of use, and they have lots of nice-looking icons. I chose a boot icon from the Take a Hike collection because the top hit on Google for “danner” is Danner, Inc., maker of fine hiking boots, and because hiking is cool.
July 19th, 2004 at 7:49 pm
Tim, you just crack me up. I have several comments to make about this post:
-You just crack me up. I think it is funny and cute.
Thanks for making me laugh!
-I could have told you that, Tim.
hee hee
-you should have made the icon a roll.
So for those of you who don’t know – Tim was working on “roles” at work, and not being able to think of an icon for “role,” he designed a temporary “roll” icon for it instead. Yeah, I am stuck with Tim and his bad jokes – feel my pain.
He tried to draw the dinner roll with a bottom part and the round parts on top. Anyhow, his roll ended up looking like a chef hat to some, a rocket to some, and (as you might imagine) something a bit more, um, Freudian to others. It was pretty darn funny, actually. Tim – could you post your icon? I think that would make everyone laugh. 
I thought it was great, anyhow.
July 19th, 2004 at 7:54 pm
(Warning: pointless smiliery precedes.)
Go figure. Sheesh.
July 25th, 2004 at 11:48 pm
I used WordPress for a bit before switching to Texptattern. WordPress has a lot of nice features, and it definitely has a gorgeous composer window…much nicer than Movable Type.
Your site looks very nice, by the way. It’s really clean and the layout is attractive. As for the spell check, I can’t suggest anything; I wish there were one in Mozilla/Firefox as well. Safari has a built-in spellcheck, but I just can’t get used to working with it. Type-ahead find for links is a feature I’ve learned to love and I don’t think I can live without it. That, and image blocking.