Gareth: Heh. You will use the holiday skin and like it.
Amy: Can I quote you on that when I post the entry about all this?
For those of you who used your best StrongBad "Holy crap!" voice when you showed up here, relax. 'cat.net hasn't been taken over by aliens yet. There will be no alien takeover until December; until then we're free to make merry and taunt the cats.
(There is, however, a growing rumor that the cats are in collusion with the invading horde. Remember the April 2003 'Takeover' series? Be afraid...)
Nevertheless. I digress.
]]>Gareth: Heh. You will use the holiday skin and like it.
Amy: Can I quote you on that when I post the entry about all this?
For those of you who used your best StrongBad "Holy crap!" voice when you showed up here, relax. 'cat.net hasn't been taken over by aliens yet. There will be no alien takeover until December; until then we're free to make merry and taunt the cats.
(There is, however, a growing rumor that the cats are in collusion with the invading horde. Remember the April 2003 'Takeover' series? Be afraid...)
Nevertheless. I digress.
Welcome to Domesticat-On-Holiday, version IV. It's become something of a painful winter tradition around here that I rip down whatever perfectly-functioning design I had on this site and replace it with a partially-functioning, utterly-different design just to torture my friends for the duration of the holiday season. I'm pleased to say that around here, some things do stay the same.
I've been needing to do some serious housecleaning behind the scenes for about a year now, but knew that such a process would probably require disabling skins while I take an industrial-strength code cleaner to two years' worth of website cobwebs.
Um, how about now? After all, if you're distressed by the loss of your favorite skin, you can toddle over to your nearest market-of-choice and buy eggnog. Better yet, buy some rum to go with it. Pour yourself a cup of eggnog. Or a cup of rum. Garnish the eggnog with the rum, or the rum with the eggnog, depending on your state of desperation. Either way, I guarantee that you won't care about your favorite skin being gone once you've drunk the contents of the cup.
Wasn't I talking about site changes? Yeesh. I thought this kind of forgetfulness and digression was only supposed to happen after the cup of rum. I may be in for a long holiday season this year...
Right then. Changes. For entries on the front page, the text links for permalinks and emailing me are now gone; they're now obnoxiously cute pixellated images next to the title, with a shiny new graphic next to it: the "all entries from this week" graphic.
I finally got periodic archives working in a decent fashion. (See, I told you the aliens were coming.)
Word counts and pull quotes are now visible, because it amused me.
Most of what's going to happen from now on won't be terribly visible to other people. Many of the extraneous pages on cat.net need to be shifted around. You don't have to look at my dirty directory structure, but I do. I'm gonna take the good old mod_rewrite scrubbie to the org structure and remake it in my own internally-sensible yet externally-incomprehensible image.
The big issue is the lack of skins. The eighteen million "how do I skin my site?" visitors will just have to get over that. I feel some degree of responsibility to maintain skinning on this site, but, you know what? I wrote a tutorial a couple of years ago. I'm glad people have used it - glad, but essentially surprised. There comes a point where I should be allowed to say, "Glad you like it, but there are now plenty of well-skinned sites out there that you can look at while my site undergoes some sorely-needed housecleaning."
Until things are back up, we're just boneless/skinless around here. We do not taste like chicken, though.
Holler if things break. They will. Meanwhile, my karmic duty dictates I go to the post office. It's against my religious beliefs to visit any stores on the day after Thanksgiving, so I'm preparing now.
]]>Current music: Rupert Holmes' "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)".
…but I don't call it that. It may have two titles on its own, but Jeff can attest that I call it by a third of my own making: "The Infidelity Song." I made this killer two-CD mp3 set of cheesy 70s and 80s tunes for Chris, and I managed to suck myself into my own cheesy music. Grr. *laugh*
'Mint' also picked up a wallop of a rework in the process; it had bothered me for some time, but it took me ages to get around to redoing it. Any more subtle and the new version would actually fall asleep in your lap. (Take a peek if you like.)
Impressive, really. Takes work to be that deliberately monochromatic.
Am thinking of scrapping the least-popular skin and slotting in a new one in its place. Any suggestions on a theme/topic/color combination. Pink is out; we've got too much pink already, and this one definitely should not have a cat on it (already ran that theme into the ground).
I'm sure there's something worth mining for a photo or two. I'll have to give it a thought or two.
(P.S. - Huntsville locals, don't forget to book Wednesday night - Mexican and margaritas for all. We have graduations to celebrate!)
]]>Call it a side effect of all the Christmas music I've been playing lately, but I've made 'sleigh bells' [see a screenshot] the default skin for the holiday season. Those of you who have already picked a skin won't see a change, but those of you visiting the site for the first time will see 'sleigh bells' instead of 'mint.' (I don't like 'mint'. I wanted an excuse to make it all go away.)
The text size is comfortable for me, but if it's too small for a bunch of folk, I'll consider making it a bit bigger.
(Now I really have to get the search function working again. Sigh.)
While I'm at it, it's also probably time for my yearly watching of 'The Grinch That Stole Christmas.' Maybe this will be the year I can finally sing along to all the songs…
]]>New setup should hopefully be a bit more intuitive to new folks:
]]>New setup should hopefully be a bit more intuitive to new folks:
The other changes will affect the longtime readers more: I've gone through a good number of skins and made changes today. I've fixed the nagging problems with 'nautical' (today's word is "finally!"), as well as given the following skins customizable sidebars:
This means that only "No-graphics" (#3), "Touch of grey" (#4), "myeyes" (#12), and "pda-friendly" (#13) do not have customizable sidebars. If anyone's interested I'll do the customization to "no-graphics", but the other three have design elements that will make it difficult, impossible, or just plain stupid to implement that level of customization.
Next up, I have really got to get the site-search function written/fixed. It's been down since I moved to Quarto. Ah, well, such is the life when you write your own CMS.
]]>Long ago, when I got started on this bizarre skinning odyssey, I'd had the idea of creating not just skins, but groups of skins. With not much thought, you'll figure out that pazdziernika (fall) and glacial (winter) are intended to be part of a series.
]]>Long ago, when I got started on this bizarre skinning odyssey, I'd had the idea of creating not just skins, but groups of skins. With not much thought, you'll figure out that pazdziernika (fall) and glacial (winter) are intended to be part of a series.
But who knows when I'll get around to creating the companion pieces for spring and summer?My last burst of skins-related activity came in late April and early May of this year. I finished snow-comes first, then began working on two companion skins. When I created acquiescence, which had a photo of Edmund as its centerpiece, I intended it to be part of a two-piece set. The original idea would be to have a similarly-toned skin featuring a photo of Tenzing serving as the other half.
I designed the flat for trompe l'œil and finished it on Wednesday, April 30 - a day before posting acquiescence - but found myself more fascinated with the ideas incorporated in the skin than the actual skin itself. The subtle use of color to create the impression of raised buttons and lowered form fields can be traced directly back to this skin.
If you go by the dates of posting, trompe l'œil will appear to be derivative of a lot of the work I've done over the past six months, but the reverse is true. The ideas that I got from this skin quickly percolated through most of the pre-existing skins, at the expense of this one actually being posted.
So, as a sort of an answer to a question that probably no one knew was even being posed, here it is. You can see the full-sized screenshot here or you can wander over to the skins page to see the full stats on the skin.
As always, if there are any problems with your particular browser, please let me know. My testbed currently consists of a Win2K machine, covered in CD-Rs, settled bits of cat fur, many scribbled notes, IE 6.0, Opera 6.02, and Mozilla 1.2a. I suspect that IE for Macs will have an issue with this skin, but I hope I'm wrong; I suspect Mozilla for Macs will render it just fine.
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