Categories
Random observations

Upgraded to WordPress 2.7

WordPress 2.7So as per my last post, I’ve been playing around with my weblog a bit. I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.7, which features a completely overhauled administration dashboard. In addition, threaded comments are now built into WordPress, so there’s no need for a plugin. I just needed to hack my theme a little bit to take advantage of this feature. I’ve done a minimal job, so threaded comments don’t look that great at the moment. I’ve added some test comments in the comments section below.

Another thing I’ve done is fully widgetize my blog. So everything that used to be hand-coded into the various PHP files that make up my theme is now a widget (Twitter feed, Google Analytics and so on). This makes everything much easier to maintain, and change, if I feel like it.

In related news, AJ has made the switch to WordPress from Blosxom. I’m pretty sure he won’t look back. I’ve been using WordPress since mid-2005, and I reckon WordPress is getting better with every release (2.7 in particular is a pretty big step in the right direction, IMHO). It’s very well supported, has a large user community, and it just works. Fantastic.

Update 29 Dec, 2008: I’m now using a variant of Chris Harrison‘s threaded comment styling. He’s written a tutorial on how to style your comments.

Categories
Random observations

Re-organised weblog categories

The list of categories on my weblog was slowly growing. So I overhauled them. I’ve reduced them to a set of six, and converted the others to tags. I noticed that, for a long time now, when it comes to publishing an article, I’ve been fighting the urge to add a new category. Now I choose a single category for the post, if I can, and then just add a bunch of tags, which is pretty much whatever flies out the ends of my fingers as I type. If I can’t choose a category, it gets filed as a Random Observation, and tagged as just described. If you read The Thin Line web site as opposed to the RSS feed, you’ll notice a tag cloud on the left, and a much shorter list of categories. I don’t know whether this will help you navigate, but it removes a mental hurdle for me.

Categories
Eco-philo-pol

When policing is not policing

Nick Holmes a Court had his Blackberry forceably confiscated from his person by NSW police after he filmed them conducting a search. Apparently, the police had no right to do this, thank goodness. Holmes a Court twittered his experience minutes after the incident.

I’ve previously documented my thinking on issues of surveillance, though I hadn’t specifically considered the situation where a member of the public films a police operation or an operation conducted by some other state agency. I think what I wrote in that article holds for this case, too. If anything, I’d expressly encourage this sort of surveillance. We still live in a free democracy, don’t we?

Categories
Random observations

Herman’s Hermits – No milk today

Herman’s Hermits – No milk today

Categories
Innovation

Thanks for your help

To those who responded to my plea for help by leaving a comment or responding out-of-band, thank you very much. We’ve settled on a name for our application, purchased the corresponding domain names and filed a trade mark application.

Will keep you posted as things evolve further. But just to give you an idea, we’ve already iterated through several “alpha” versions and expect to have a public beta ready by the end of February. Stay tuned for an explanation of what the service actually does.

Categories
Innovation

Frameworks Are The Future of Design – A (Long) Presentation

Categories
Random observations

The SVNMate plugin for Textmate

For anyone who’s using Subversion through Textmate, you might be interest in Ciarán Walsh’s SVNMate plugin. It changes the icons for files and folders in the project drawer depending upon their SVN status. Very handy.