It’s been a good long ride guys, but for now I’m done blogging. I don’t have much I want to share on here lately, and most of you are being disappointed with lack of updates anyways when you click here.
Maybe at some later point, I’ll feel the desire to type again … we’ll see.
For now, thanks, and virtual homage to you for getting the title reference.
It’s hard to believe that it’s only been a year since I ported this blog over to Wordpress completely, leaving the original blogger-hosted blog in the dust. It’s felt like forever, and before I stumbled on the old blog somewhere on this never-forget-anything cyberspace, I honestly couldn’t even recall what the old blog looked like anymore.
Honestly, the old theme was starting to get on my nerves. There were serious code glitches everywhere, causing incompatibilities with Firefox versus IE versus other browsers I didn’t even have the energy to bother to check. I thought I had fixed most of them, but there were a few elusive ones that never got addressed (see fellow CSS-nerd and site-overhauler, Liang’s comment on this post). Hopefully, with this new theme, things are more under control, and more consistent from browser to browser, and view format to view format (ie. main view versus archives view).
The deviations from the default theme include:
Potential future modifications, if I ever get around to it:
Okay, I think that’s enough coding for one day.
I have to sheepishly admit that I completely forgot about browser compatibilities issues when I made my new blog design. I normally run Firefox, and after so many hours tweaking margins and paddings and layouts to get this page to look “just right” in the browser, the thought never even crossed my mind to check in Internet Explorer. I was horrified when I happened to access this page with my dad’s computer tonight. Ugh, IE is so much less forgiving on math mistakes than Firefox. An error of 5 pixels made my sidebar go berserk.
Anyway, sidebar issue is fixed. I can’t speak for any other browsers besides IE and Firefox. There is still a tiny layout issue with IE, but I can’t debug it for the life of me. Oh well.
In the meantime, can I convince everyone to switch to Firefox? Your health kinda depends on it.
New look. New blog. New year (almost). The original thought was that I’d work on changing the look of this thing a little bit each day, and I would eventually finish in time by New Year’s, giving this a facelift for 2006. Once I started fiddling around though, I couldn’t stop. When I got a look that I sort of liked, I couldn’t wait until Jan 1 to start using it. So, even though it’s not quite the new year yet, here’s the new look.
The change goes deeper than the look. The complete overhaul comes from the change in the engine behind the look. I’ve given up eblogger for good and moved on to WordPress. The old blog is still around, and is accessible. I’ve ported the entries from this month and last month to this new world. Everything older, you’ll have to go to that link.
So what’s actually different?
… a blog overhaul. Some design issues have to be fixed first, but watch for a new look in the next few days. The new look may or may not be permanent. It depends on how creative and ambitious I get with the CSS.
I moved my blog to a simpler address: http://www.shanwu.com/blog instead of the originally tedious one. Please update your links!
I’m thinking about making a new page, a snappier one that’s less artsy, and perhaps more techie? Or maybe a combination of techie and artsy. Anyway, so I thought about how I want my new “about me” page to look. Here’s a thought:
There are many things that I miss here in New England, a list of which actually would tell a lot about me: I miss generally friendly people, my parents, country music, warm weather, relatively less stress, black tie formals, novels, slower pace, friends, reading the newspaper every morning with breakfast, conservatives (or rather just moderates since I really can’t stand hard right religious conservatives).
Things I don’t miss: nagging parents (though they don’t really nag me anymore, which makes me miss them more and makes me feel guilty for thinking bad things about them when they nag me), people who hate lgbt, 100+ degree summers.
Then I thought … why must I make an “about me” page anyway? Who really cares? Are these pages simply on the web as a means of spewing self-importance? People who read it probably are my friends and would then know me anyway, and hopefully know the information I put on this page … and when it comes down to it, I really don’t think there are people out there dying to find out more about me. Those same non-existent people are also not going to go google me to find a webpage to learn more about me. Same with this blog … mostly I write for myself, so why have stuff like this??
All of this probably goes once again to my conforming nature … everybody has an “about me” page if they have a webpage. In fact, beginning web design classes usually walk you through designing a page about yourself. So naturally, I have one. And also, it’s interesting running into a friend I haven’t seen in a while and realize that he knows a lot about what’s going on in my life. How? He’s a loyal “conjured activism” reader. The debates about whether or not this is awkward will have to be saved for another entry.
I made some adjustments to my homepage. I think that they are pretty major adjustments, but probably folks who go there won’t realize that a lot of it is different. The gallery pictures have been redone (and will be redone again once I do some more sorting), some incompatibilities with Mozilla Firefox have been fixed (sorry, didn’t do anything for Netscape), and the about page description has been updated. I hope to add a links page some time in the near future as well.
Along with making changes to the site, I thought hard about my page’s Google ranking, which has always been pretty low. Or I should say, has always been inconsistent. My page gets very high Google search results (#3 if you search for shan wu :). However, this is only true for the mirror that is hosted by UVA (which is outdated since I now only upload changes to my domain at www.shanwu.com). My actual domain is not even in the top 100 even, though it exists in Google’s cache. To add to the oddity, Google’s cache for shanwu.com mysteriously points to the URL of my mirrored site as hosted by UVA …
So somehow, Google’s mighty intelligent spiderbot realizes that there are two versions of my webpage on the web. It indexes the version on UVA’s server and essentially ignores shanwu.com. So I’m not really sure what’s going on with Google, but I made some changes that will hopefully knock some sense into Google’s little robot and make it realize that my page is no longer at http://www.people.virginia.edu/~sw9j and if anything, that people.virginia.edu site is a mirror of the MAIN ONE at www.shanwu.com.
Alright, that was a long rant on something pretty nerdy and probably trivially confusing.