A Random Pattern

With the fixes I implemented last night, careful inspection later (read: today) reveal that I partially broke my page in IE. Yet another reason that you should be browsing the web in style. A fix is in progress, and I’ll document it here when I get it actually working.

I also verified that the sidebar on single pages goes right over the footer. I found one suggestion for fixing it, but that didn’t seem to work. Anyone have any ideas?

My fix for navigation links on single posts didn’t fix anything. So back to the drawing board for that too…

Update:  The breakage on IE was worse than I thought, so I’ve moved the subscription block back to the bottom right for now.  Hopefully the fix for that is easy.

What do you think? A new look for me?

Generate your own Web 2.0 label here, and join the clueless throng of internet devotees in celebrating and mocking something you don’t quite understand…

If you don’t get the joke, don’t worry. Most of the people who do get it don’t realize the joke they’re laughing at is on them. If that’s too meta for you, just skip this whole post. Or you can reference the word I made up and it’s definition:

dis-coordinated: unharmonious clumbsiness

Here are a few links on getting Ubuntu up and running with all the little goodies you might want:

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-14062.html This is a forum where airtonix has a post (near the bottom) on getting WordPress up and running on Ubuntu. I’m still struggling with this, but realized I went about it the wrong way. There’s an option when you first install Ubuntu to install a “LAMP” stack. Choose this if you want to use your installation as a server for WP publishing, even privately.

http://torrez.us/myubuntu/ Someone writes on going “cold turkey” Ubuntu. Interesting, if a bit scary at first, with a ton of CLI (command line interface) stuff. My recommendations: 1. Don’t read this unless you’re a big geek. 2. Just install Ubuntu, and do things the nice easy graphical way. When you run into a problem, then worry about solving it. It’s much easier to take things one challenge at a time, and every issue you face is solvable one way or another.

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=186792 Similar to above, but a little more friendly. This is an Ubuntu “customization guide”, and the idea is to make sure you can use all the proprietary stuff that you also used on Windows or Mac, probably without realizing it. Stuff like Adobe reader, Flash, mp3s, all those are licensed and somebody has to pay for you to use a copy. Luckily there are easy ways to get this set up on Ubuntu. Again, my recommendations: Try easyUbuntu and automatix first.

List of what’s fixed, what needs to be fixed, and other changes to my blog:

Fixed:

• Sidebar now displays (mostly) as intended, with each section / widget displaying in it’s own floating white box.
• Sidebar shows up on single (post) pages.
• Unfortunately, I think that’s it. But I *felt* productive!

Need to be fixed or added (please add to this list in the comments!):

• Make sure Sidebar doesn’t extend past/over footer.
• Next / previous hyperlinks on individual pages too close to header title.
• Better integrated “pages” functionality (in header?).
• rotating header capability.
• more code cleanup, such as pulling out the sidenote javascript and extra images from the package.
• Figure out how/if to have a different Sidebar (shorter, simpler?) for single post pages.

Other changes:

• I created a cool widget, see it at the bottom of my sidebar. It has links to subscribe to my blog, and to explain what “subscribe to my blog” even means. It’s also got a way to get my new posts in your email, automagically! Yay for magic internet stuff!  (This was partially motivated by a reminder of a post from Robert Scoble, whose posts I keep running into lately.)
• In order to make the cool stuff above happen, I cleaned up my feeds and autodirecting for my feeds. If you subscribed to this blog before tonight – No Worries! It will automagically forward you to the feed I want you to use (grin) so I can count how many people are (not) reading my blog. This means you don’t have to do anything! But I’m still excited about it…

I think that’s it, at least that’s all I can remember.  If the blog doesn’t look or work much differently as far as you notice, that should mean I’m doing a good job.  And if something’s broken, please tell me.  I’ll fix it if I can.