April 2008
Site Updates, Future Plans
Posted by HokieTux on April 20, 2008 in General, News
Choosing a WordPress theme for this blog was likely the most painful step of its creation. I set out to find a “good, minimalist theme”; what I seem to have found is a “good minimalist theme”. This theme’s creator appears to be adept at layout & design, but seems to have trouble actually implementing his ideas (e.g. defining a class in the CSS stylesheet, and then attempting to invoke that class with a different name – “archives” vs “archive”).
So it goes though. The last WP theme I played with was written in Italian. This theme’s code doesn’t have any comments… but if it did, at least I could read them.
Regardless, I’ve made a lot of changes / additions / fixes to the theme over the last few days:
hello, world
Posted by HokieTux on April 16, 2008 in General, News
Well, here it is, in all of its glory. A WordPress blog on the the great series of tubes (not a big truck) that is the intarweb.
I’ve mulled over starting a blog a number of times. I actually did… twice, I think – both using Google’s Blogspot software. The first was entirely worthless, and created merely to play around with Google’s newly-aquired blogger software. The second actually served a purpose, and had a tutorial for getting xspim running on OS X as its initial post. At the time, there were a few annoying bugs that prevented the code from compiling. A few weeks after I posted the fix, the developer(s) fixed the bug(s), released a new version, and I promptly forgot about my blog.
Pragmatically, every hacker has utility for a blog. We have all discovered some hack, a bug-fix, or written a script that others would find helpful. Since the beginning of my Linux years, blog posts by fellow hackers have fixed some of the most frustrating of my problems. Or, more often than not, after discovering and applying the hack, it is forgotten and a year later when you realize you need it again, you can’t remember what the hell you did the first time around.
This is not to say, of course, that there won’t be non-utilitarian posts. I’m sure I’ll post the occasional rant about the stupidity of DRM, corporate greed and net-neutrality, or the arrogant politician that proves his/her utter ignorance of all things technical and intellectual.
I expect this blog to be technical and pragmatic – not a livejournal; subjective and biased – not general and objective; open to comments and discussion (I’ll turn on WP comments once I get a spam filter installed) – not China.
There are obviously some major items to attend to before this blog is truly ‘ready’ – creating a non-admin user and a spam filter come to mind… as well as coming up with with a blog title that isn’t quite so contrived.
And so, as Brian Kernighan printed in 1972, “hello, world”
* On a more somber note, today is the one-year anniversary of the shootings at my university. We remember you 32, fellow Hokies. Hokie Pride.
