The Academica theme is oriented a little more towards discussions. It's what I used when I was fooling around at the beginning of the month and trying to recreate the old layout. I prefer the new look overall. My main complaint (with my script disabled) is that there's way too much vertical white space.
WordPress provides an "Additional CSS" textbox in one of its configuration places that's a convenient way to override the theme's styling. Of course, using it requires that you have some understanding of the theme's use of CSS classes, ids, etc. Or you can define a plug-in that has just enough PHP to load a CSS file that overrides the style. I probably haven't said this here before since the old site was Typepad, but between the core/theme/plugin model, PHP, and CSS, WordPress has managed to recreate all of the development nightmares of late-90s Microsoft Windows.
I won't be of any help here. I have a piece of JavaScript that runs on every page that I download. It forces my own choice of fonts, sizes, vertical spacing, and color adjustments on the text. I've already changed the small part that is specific to Obsidian Wings. Between a good adblocker and my script, my view of the Web is much more consistent and less garish than what non-fanatic people see. Y'all may decide that Papyrus is the official Font of Moderation, but I'll still see Noto Serif.
The JavaScript thing got started one day when I encountered too many pages that made you want to find the designer so you could ask, "Did you study ugly and unreadable in school, or are you just naturally gifted?"
I'm a believer in the original spirit of HTML -- the writer gets to specify structure, but presentation decisions belong to the reader. If it's important that the text be rendered in some obscure spidery gothic font, well, that's what PDF is for.
The Constitution already gives power over them exclusively to Congress.
Who delegated some amount of that power to the President, in the event of an emergency. Congress didn't specify what was an emergency and what not. The current SCOTUS seems inclined to the position that absent a specification, an emergency is whatever the President says it is.
For someone soon to turn 72, I seem to have remarkably few aches and pains. My sister is younger, and I have quit comparing notes with her because I feel guilty. Given our two histories, I'm the one you would expect to have painful worn-out joints*. All of mine seem to be cranking along fine. She's replaced both knees, one hip, one shoulder, and had an ankle rebuilt.
For the record, last time out on the bicycle I did 20 miles. I have had to admit that I will be the slowest person on the trail from now on, because the people I used to pass have all got e-bikes. I'm old-fashioned, I guess -- the goal is to conquer the uphill bits on your own, not to pass the job over to some batteries.
* Bicycling since I was six with the inevitable falls, plus off-and-on golf, racquet sports, soccer, basketball, softball, hiking/climbing, fencing, lugging around children (and now grandchildren). A variety of joints occasionally sprained, with only amateur stretching and PT routines during recovery. Tossed down the side of a mountain by a horse once.
I remain a registered Democrat. However, here in Colorado we recently passed the point where more than half of all registered voters are registered as "unaffiliated". My first reaction when I read the story in the local paper was to wonder if people were hiding from the nastiness.
Indeed, I will be unsurprised if NO Korean companies are willing to consider new facilities in the US.
One big question is the massive integrated circuit fab Samsung is building in Texas. It's supposed to cost $17B to build fully, and some small parts are preparing to open soon. The motivation behind it is, of course, both Biden and Trump's insistence that Samsung and TSMC bring their bleeding-edge technology to the US. The fab complex is so large that some of Samsung's primary Korean suppliers have also started building large operations nearby.
So this is by way of a test, to see if posts with links automatically go into moderation:
WordPress has a stock filter that puts comments with more than n links into moderation automatically. Somewhere in the settings the value of n can be changed.
Iirc it was the post right before “What to do?” but the wayback machine’s last entry is for Aug 23, and it was later than that
Right after "What to do?" I have it w/o any comments in a different file and will send that to lj. By the time I tried extracting it with comments, Typepad had gone into partial failure mode. I'll keep checking from time to time in hopes that they get it running properly for a few more days before the final shutdown.
Spam filters are part of each hosting service's "secret sauce". Wherever we end up, I can pretty much guarantee that legitimate comments will still go into spam, but for a different set of unknown reasons.
GftNC, updating my archive takes minutes and can be done right up until Typepad shuts the servers down. No real reason to stop posting and/or commenting yet. Most convenient timing might be when lj decides he's ready to move the last several posts and comments to the new site; I can update my archive and provide him with a file with those posts/comments that WP will import.
Just a thought, that if the archive site is also WordPress, all WP sites require some amount of ongoing maintenance even if the content doesn't. That's just the way WP has set things up. At some point, one or more of the WP version, the PHP version, the theme version, or the widgets version will get out of whack and the site will just stop running.
Each of the long-running blogs I follow that run on WP eventually puts up a post saying, "We have to upgrade. Sh*t will be broken."
WP's current import function appears to be robust enough that loading the old content is just tedious, not difficult. And can be done after the new site is running.
Back in the day they would have worked with WordPress to migrate anyone that chose to move There was a certain sensitivity to just killing people's content.... I am curious, I will look later, to see if anyone is offering migration.
GoDaddy, where I rent my domain and cloud server, offers to migrate sites from other platforms to WordPress for a fee. GoDaddy will do pretty much anything for a fee :^)
Typepad.com hasn't signed up new customers for Moveable Type sites for five years now. Two years ago, they came close to shutting down the Moveable Type service. I seem to recall from then that they offered to migrate people to a WordPress service under the same corporate umbrella. Guess they're on the "well, we warned you" plan this time.
I tested the WordPress import function against a subset of my archive today, and it worked fine. I think we're down to where it's just going to be tedious now.
Since there are a number of readers interested...
Typepad's export function appears to be broken, at least for content as large as Obsidian Wings'. I have updated my software for scraping the site content the hard way -- Typepad added more stuff to discourage scraping. I've updated my site archive to this morning and put a copy up in the cloud where the editors can access it. There may be some hiccups, but this was (imo) the critical step to preserve the site's history.
I admit to a certain amount of curiosity about how many other long-running blogs there may be for whom the export function is broken, who don't have access to a stubborn old software guy?
...and am about to order a buckwheat husk pillow. This is the brand I got most recently. There was a very faint dried plant material sort of odor for a few days. On the higher end price for a pillow, but I expect to use it for >10 years.
Priority item from my perspective... Verify the Typepad export function still works. Last time around, the Typepad update that fixed export broke my code that had scraped the site contents the hard way. If the export function is broken again, fix my code and scrape content newer than what I got previously. Once that's done, retrieve any images hosted by Typepad that are newer than my last checkpoint. Once there's a safe copy of the content, the rest is just details :^) I'll take on this task and let select people know when I have put a copy in a public place.
My initial opinion is that moving ObWi to a WordPress site is straightforward. That's not necessarily the same as either simple or easy. I'll write something more detailed in the morning for people to pick at.
I don't understand why one wouldn't be helpful to anyone one works with, or anyone at all. Just, why not?
During my time as a manager, our center (~100 people) was assembled from various parts of the old Bell System, and charged with delivering the legally required changes to the local telcos' networks. Half of that staff came from a part of AT&T where the working philosophy was, "You advance your career over the bodies of your colleagues." Most of the meetings I went to was for the purpose of keeping those *ssholes from stabbing us in the back.
I could understand it somewhat. Their part of AT&T had a zillion different levels and salary was closely tied to level. If you didn't get one of the two promotions from "junior assistant flunky" to "assistant flunky" in your organization this year, you didn't get a raise. I came from Bell Labs where almost everyone not in an administrative position was a "member of technical staff". Salaries for MTS covered a spread of perhaps 8x: an MTS with 35 years of experience and demonstrated brilliance might make 8x what a starting MTS made. More than 8x in special cases, like winning a Nobel prize :^)
At the moment, Bolton is merely a private citizen, who will have to impoverish himself to defend against charges that will eventually be dropped. Powell is still Chair of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. I know Trump has some serious nut cases at DOJ, but even those have to be somewhat reluctant to piss off most of the rich people in the country by attacking Powell on fictitious grounds.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Time for a makeover: a webpage design thread”
The Academica theme is oriented a little more towards discussions. It's what I used when I was fooling around at the beginning of the month and trying to recreate the old layout. I prefer the new look overall. My main complaint (with my script disabled) is that there's way too much vertical white space.
WordPress provides an "Additional CSS" textbox in one of its configuration places that's a convenient way to override the theme's styling. Of course, using it requires that you have some understanding of the theme's use of CSS classes, ids, etc. Or you can define a plug-in that has just enough PHP to load a CSS file that overrides the style. I probably haven't said this here before since the old site was Typepad, but between the core/theme/plugin model, PHP, and CSS, WordPress has managed to recreate all of the development nightmares of late-90s Microsoft Windows.
"
I won't be of any help here. I have a piece of JavaScript that runs on every page that I download. It forces my own choice of fonts, sizes, vertical spacing, and color adjustments on the text. I've already changed the small part that is specific to Obsidian Wings. Between a good adblocker and my script, my view of the Web is much more consistent and less garish than what non-fanatic people see. Y'all may decide that Papyrus is the official Font of Moderation, but I'll still see Noto Serif.
The JavaScript thing got started one day when I encountered too many pages that made you want to find the designer so you could ask, "Did you study ugly and unreadable in school, or are you just naturally gifted?"
I'm a believer in the original spirit of HTML -- the writer gets to specify structure, but presentation decisions belong to the reader. If it's important that the text be rendered in some obscure spidery gothic font, well, that's what PDF is for.
On “We are all Usain Bolt now”
Lest anyone think I'm asserting that I'm immune to aging, I have a list of things to demonstrate that I'm not. It's just that none of them hurt.
On “An experimental first post”
The Constitution already gives power over them exclusively to Congress.
Who delegated some amount of that power to the President, in the event of an emergency. Congress didn't specify what was an emergency and what not. The current SCOTUS seems inclined to the position that absent a specification, an emergency is whatever the President says it is.
On “We are all Usain Bolt now”
For someone soon to turn 72, I seem to have remarkably few aches and pains. My sister is younger, and I have quit comparing notes with her because I feel guilty. Given our two histories, I'm the one you would expect to have painful worn-out joints*. All of mine seem to be cranking along fine. She's replaced both knees, one hip, one shoulder, and had an ankle rebuilt.
For the record, last time out on the bicycle I did 20 miles. I have had to admit that I will be the slowest person on the trail from now on, because the people I used to pass have all got e-bikes. I'm old-fashioned, I guess -- the goal is to conquer the uphill bits on your own, not to pass the job over to some batteries.
* Bicycling since I was six with the inevitable falls, plus off-and-on golf, racquet sports, soccer, basketball, softball, hiking/climbing, fencing, lugging around children (and now grandchildren). A variety of joints occasionally sprained, with only amateur stretching and PT routines during recovery. Tossed down the side of a mountain by a horse once.
On “Notes about commenting”
Final test, I'm now logged out but have had comments approved for this post.
"
The last one did. Testing to see if this comment goes to moderation while I'm logged in.
"
Testing to see if this comment goes to moderation or not.
On “Guestpost from Wonkie”
I remain a registered Democrat. However, here in Colorado we recently passed the point where more than half of all registered voters are registered as "unaffiliated". My first reaction when I read the story in the local paper was to wonder if people were hiding from the nastiness.
On “Hyudai, meet ICE”
Indeed, I will be unsurprised if NO Korean companies are willing to consider new facilities in the US.
One big question is the massive integrated circuit fab Samsung is building in Texas. It's supposed to cost $17B to build fully, and some small parts are preparing to open soon. The motivation behind it is, of course, both Biden and Trump's insistence that Samsung and TSMC bring their bleeding-edge technology to the US. The fab complex is so large that some of Samsung's primary Korean suppliers have also started building large operations nearby.
On “Excelsior!”
So this is by way of a test, to see if posts with links automatically go into moderation:
WordPress has a stock filter that puts comments with more than n links into moderation automatically. Somewhere in the settings the value of n can be changed.
"
At the archive, many/all of the comments are duplicated.
"
Iirc it was the post right before “What to do?” but the wayback machine’s last entry is for Aug 23, and it was later than that
Right after "What to do?" I have it w/o any comments in a different file and will send that to lj. By the time I tried extracting it with comments, Typepad had gone into partial failure mode. I'll keep checking from time to time in hopes that they get it running properly for a few more days before the final shutdown.
On “What to do?”
GftNC, most of the Olmsted links are dead, or will be come Sep 30. Some maintenance will be required.
"
So, adversarial AI training, out in the wild. What could possibly go wrong?
"
Spam filters are part of each hosting service's "secret sauce". Wherever we end up, I can pretty much guarantee that legitimate comments will still go into spam, but for a different set of unknown reasons.
"
GftNC, updating my archive takes minutes and can be done right up until Typepad shuts the servers down. No real reason to stop posting and/or commenting yet. Most convenient timing might be when lj decides he's ready to move the last several posts and comments to the new site; I can update my archive and provide him with a file with those posts/comments that WP will import.
"
Just a thought, that if the archive site is also WordPress, all WP sites require some amount of ongoing maintenance even if the content doesn't. That's just the way WP has set things up. At some point, one or more of the WP version, the PHP version, the theme version, or the widgets version will get out of whack and the site will just stop running.
Each of the long-running blogs I follow that run on WP eventually puts up a post saying, "We have to upgrade. Sh*t will be broken."
WP's current import function appears to be robust enough that loading the old content is just tedious, not difficult. And can be done after the new site is running.
"
Back in the day they would have worked with WordPress to migrate anyone that chose to move There was a certain sensitivity to just killing people's content.... I am curious, I will look later, to see if anyone is offering migration.
GoDaddy, where I rent my domain and cloud server, offers to migrate sites from other platforms to WordPress for a fee. GoDaddy will do pretty much anything for a fee :^)
Typepad.com hasn't signed up new customers for Moveable Type sites for five years now. Two years ago, they came close to shutting down the Moveable Type service. I seem to recall from then that they offered to migrate people to a WordPress service under the same corporate umbrella. Guess they're on the "well, we warned you" plan this time.
I tested the WordPress import function against a subset of my archive today, and it worked fine. I think we're down to where it's just going to be tedious now.
"
Since there are a number of readers interested...
Typepad's export function appears to be broken, at least for content as large as Obsidian Wings'. I have updated my software for scraping the site content the hard way -- Typepad added more stuff to discourage scraping. I've updated my site archive to this morning and put a copy up in the cloud where the editors can access it. There may be some hiccups, but this was (imo) the critical step to preserve the site's history.
I admit to a certain amount of curiosity about how many other long-running blogs there may be for whom the export function is broken, who don't have access to a stubborn old software guy?
"
...and am about to order a buckwheat husk pillow.
This is the brand I got most recently. There was a very faint dried plant material sort of odor for a few days. On the higher end price for a pillow, but I expect to use it for >10 years.
"
Priority item from my perspective... Verify the Typepad export function still works. Last time around, the Typepad update that fixed export broke my code that had scraped the site contents the hard way. If the export function is broken again, fix my code and scrape content newer than what I got previously. Once that's done, retrieve any images hosted by Typepad that are newer than my last checkpoint. Once there's a safe copy of the content, the rest is just details :^) I'll take on this task and let select people know when I have put a copy in a public place.
"
My initial opinion is that moving ObWi to a WordPress site is straightforward. That's not necessarily the same as either simple or easy. I'll write something more detailed in the morning for people to pick at.
On “David Brooks in Laodicea”
I don't understand why one wouldn't be helpful to anyone one works with, or anyone at all. Just, why not?
During my time as a manager, our center (~100 people) was assembled from various parts of the old Bell System, and charged with delivering the legally required changes to the local telcos' networks. Half of that staff came from a part of AT&T where the working philosophy was, "You advance your career over the bodies of your colleagues." Most of the meetings I went to was for the purpose of keeping those *ssholes from stabbing us in the back.
I could understand it somewhat. Their part of AT&T had a zillion different levels and salary was closely tied to level. If you didn't get one of the two promotions from "junior assistant flunky" to "assistant flunky" in your organization this year, you didn't get a raise. I came from Bell Labs where almost everyone not in an administrative position was a "member of technical staff". Salaries for MTS covered a spread of perhaps 8x: an MTS with 35 years of experience and demonstrated brilliance might make 8x what a starting MTS made. More than 8x in special cases, like winning a Nobel prize :^)
On “The Schadenfreude Express”
At the moment, Bolton is merely a private citizen, who will have to impoverish himself to defend against charges that will eventually be dropped. Powell is still Chair of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. I know Trump has some serious nut cases at DOJ, but even those have to be somewhat reluctant to piss off most of the rich people in the country by attacking Powell on fictitious grounds.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.