You’ll notice Crashed Pips is sporting a new theme, Carrington. It’s off the shelf, yes, but it’s gorgeous, at least in my opinion. There’s still a few rough edges to iron out, but hopefully you’ll find the site easier to navigate (and easier on the eye) than before.
The exciting thing about Carrington is that it’s pluggable. Endless months of experimentation wait… yay!
Rifling through the statistics page in the WordPress dashboard, I am mildly amused by some of the search terms some people use to access this blog.
Today, between 1am and 7:39pm London time, 51 visits have been made to this Web site. The top post, with seven visits to the posts page, is yesterday’s HOWTO on upgrading RAM in the Eee PC.
Quite amusingly, however, three people have reached this site today using the search terms - wait for it - “strip search”. They seem to be referred to the page on the rubbish BBC1 comedy from the people who brought you Scooby-Doo and Loose Change, The Last Enemy. One poor sod actually got referred here with the search terms “benedict cumberbatch naked”. Oh, Christ. Do people come here expecting it to be a cheap porn site?
Well, I’m afraid it’s not.
This site is now running WordPress 2.6 RC1 - and, quite satisfyingly, it now has a word count in the edit page, post revisions, and all sorts of other delights, including - for you, dear readers - faster page load times.
You’ll also note that the logo has been revised. Graphite-tastic…
Update at 1630GMT: Please note that the terms and conditions have been revised slightly, to accomodate for the now-public Crashed Pips Killfile Dungeon. It’s full of the unsavouries which are in the comment blacklist, for various reasons.
Update at 2238GMT: Some more functional additions to the blog now include the return of the Share This button, and some new, stylish drop caps on the posts. Oooh… shiny…
I’ve revised the theme to include two sidebars. I understand that it’s quite cramped, but for the moment you’ll have to make do. You can also expect a few aesthetic changes: for example, maybe a new header background and colour package.
This blog’s theme, Avenir, launched in November, replacing the old Freshy theme. At first it was ugly, buggy and required a lot of attention. But, in the end, it became more usable.
However, I’m still not entirely happy with it. This is mostly because it’s fixed width, and because of the problems stemming from that. I dislike the fact that the text area is very wide, making it somewhat difficult to read some of the content. I’d like to replace that with two sidebars, and perhaps put a video player on the main page as well.
I’m also not very fond of the navigation bar being at the top. I’d like to move this to the side, BBC News-stylee, and perhaps flesh it out a bit. OK, a lot. Either way, you get my point: I have many changes I’d like to make to the theme. There are also several major bugs (such as a disappearing div when Gravatars appear) which I need to kill.
I’ve decided that at some point I will rewrite the theme from the ground up. However, I’d like your input: what do you think would make the site prettier/quicker/nicer et cetera? Drop your comments below, and please be careful of the disappearing background.
I haven’t been posting normally this week. It’s usually very on and off when I do post, but this week I’ve been a lot quieter than usual.
Nevertheless, I am still alive, and will (I hope) continue to be so for the forseeable future.
Now, for some brief site housekeeping. Earlier this week, the commenting was restricted to registered users only. God knows how that happened. Nevertheless, I’ve reset it and now you should be able to happily comment again.
Also, it’s been some time since I’ve recommended a blog on this Web site (the last time, the Website of the Week Awards had to be temporarily suspended due to cheese rigging). However, if you’re a Windows user and/or a ‘download junkie’, I’d like to strongly recommend Douglas’s blog. It’s no more than a month or so since he started it, but the quality and usefulness of the tips is astounding. I’ve even found it useful: Celtx is huge fun (and works on my Mac) and I’ve picked up things that I’ve found very helpful when I’ve been working on my XP and Vista boxes.
Anyway, with that flick of the broom and point of the finger, all that remains is for me to wish all of my readers a very happy Easter.
This is being typed using WordPress 2.5! Yay!
There are still a few issues and bugs I can see, but these are already being addressed so when the final, fully polished release comes out everything will be fine.
Something I do want to point out to people planning to upgrade to 2.5 is this: the Maintenance Mode plugin seems not to work. I got around this by renaming the directory, and everything seems to be fine now. However, I would recommend not switching it on, and perhaps disabling it before upgrading.
But either way… WYSIWYG in Safari! At last! Hopefully it will produce valid XHTML…
Crashed Pips (at least, in its present form) has its first anniversary today! Yay!
You may have noticed that the theme has been revised to make it a lot lighter and prettier. The blog considers this to be a birthday present from its author. It won’t be getting anything else bar (perhaps) a fairy cake cooked in the microwave. And it’s a bunch of zeroes and ones, so it can’t eat a fairy cake.
Again, I’d like to reiterate my thanks to my readers, commenters, web host, computers (you’ve suffered such abuse for this, Welchman), and everyone who has helped to make this blog what it is, has been and will be.
Thank you.
As soon as it surfaces, which might be any time from tomorrow to several fortnights away, I’ll be upgrading the blog to WordPress 2.5. I’ll provide updates via Twitter, maybe even liveblogging the upgrade if all goes well. Either way, expect some downtime pretty soon: I will need time to upload the files, update the database and familiarise myself with the revised admin panel.
For those RSS junkies amongst you, thanks to this rather clever little utility, there is now an which contains the contents of both the main blog, and the posts I make to Twitter.
The existing services will continue as normal.
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