Tuesday - February 17, 2009

Changes

Although the look isn't especially different, the mechanics behind the blog have been substantially revamped since late last year.  I started using the latest version of iBlog late last year.  Because I have highly customized the interface instead of using a standard interface, the upgrade was quite painful.  The most recent improvements were quite painful to install, too.

This website began around 1997, long before blogs existed.  As it gradually resembled a blog and I learned that what I was doing was blogging, I've been adding standard blog features.

I have now added categories to my rants.  I've put an icon that you now see at the beginning of each rant to vaguely symbolize the category.  It's a gimmick, I guess, but it serves me for now.  The categories can be found in the archives link at the bottom of the main page.  If you click on a category, you'll see all the rants that reasonably fit therein.  Any rant that doesn't fit in any other category is simply labeled as a rant.  I suspect I'll find reason to add more categories in the future, but they'll be much easier to add now that the structure is in place.  For now the categories are 

 Bad Law:  Very opinionated comments on law.

 Education: Criticisms of the government's involvement in institutionalized behavior modification.

 Environmental Fascism:  Reasoned observations on irrational use of fuzzy animals to effect political change.

 Guns:  Yeah, guns.  Mostly politics about guns, but it could possibly include observations on the skills of shooting.

 Iraq:  Mostly my experience in Iraq, but also the part of the war on Islam as it applies exclusively to Iraq.

 Journalism:  Mockery of those that think that commenting on current events requires a special, protected caste.

Military:  Miliatary topics not related to politics, the war on Islam, or Iraq.

Politics:   Yeah, politics.

Rants:  Anything not already in another category.

Religion:  Commentary on irrational belief systems, excepting environmentalism.

War on Islam:  Discussion of how to eradicate this inhuman belief system from our world.

Only the ten most recent rants will show on the main page now.  To see others you'll have to click on the archives link at the bottom.  Also, you no longer have to go to click to see the entire rant, the entire piece of drivel is shown on the main page and on every page where it is displayed.  This should make it easier to read and I'm glad I'm finally getting rid of that unnecessary extra step for people to read the whole thing.

There are more changes I'd like to make, but I really can't justify taking time from my studies needed to put them in.  There are also at least two bugs (titles are displayed twice on category pages, and the right margin tends to march to the right for each entry on the category and archive pages) but I'm not willing to spend another night working on it.  I'm pretty sure I know how to fix the first one, but the tweaking requires a lengthy process of testing that is quite inconvenient and buggy.  I have to manipulate the code which uses a lot of java scripts.  Unfortunately, the scripts in place aren't well documented and don't seem to be internally consistent in different parts of the code.  I'm not very proficient with javascript and there seem to be some iBlog peculiarities that I can't access.  I know I can get it how I want it, but it will have to wait until after the semester is done.

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