Wrestling with WordPress

By kate on May 7th, 2007

As I move my content from various places (LiveJournal, static HTML) into WordPress, I’ve had my share of tussles with WordPress over how everything looks. I made a number of modifications to my theme (Green Lush 2 Column). The CSS can be complicated but at least it can be mastered eventually. I accept the complexity in exchange for the control I get over the layout and design.

My biggest struggle, though, has been over line breaks, of all things. I don’t know if it’s something with this theme in particular or WordPress in general, but I’m having a hard time getting WordPress to always skip a line between paragraphs. The problem is not the style of the paragraph… that’s set correctly. The problem is that WordPress will sometimes swallow up a line break and smoosh two paragraphs together. This tends to happen at least once in every entry with more than two paragraphs.

I tried many things to impose my will. I re-entered all the line breaks in the WYSIWYG editor. I manually added break and/or paragraph tags in the HTML editor. Nothing worked consistently!

I finally came to a compromise solution, which is stupid but always works. After writing or importing an entry, I switch to the HTML editor and put a   (blank space) on the empty line between each paragraph.

If you’ve encountered this issue yourself, I’d love to hear about it.

Filed under: meta, technology | Comment now »

Grandmom was a Blogger

By kate on May 3rd, 2007

Before she died several years ago, my father’s mother, Grandmom, kept in touch with my parents by sending them cut-out newspaper articles she thought they’d find interesting. I remember my parents rolling their eyes good-naturedly as her cut-outs became more and more prolific.

Then, lately, I’ve noticed my parents doing the same thing, particularly my dad. He often cuts out articles from newspapers and magazines and saves them for me. I was reading the latest one, an interesting article from IEEE about the structure of consciousness, when something occurred to me.*

He and Grandmom clipping out articles to share is no different than my impulse to tell my friends about the clever website I just discovered. It is, essentially, blogging. Just because Grandmom didn’t own a computer doesn’t mean that our generation invented the need to share interesting stories. We’ve just improved the method, allowing for that same newspaper article to be shared with a large group rather than mailed to a single person.

This new way of looking at it gives me more respect for my dad and his cut-out articles. After all, he tends to choose really interesting articles. I bet he would have a good blog.

* This epiphany is actually related to the theory of strange loops in the linked article, which posits that a “strange loop” (system) can work with the same larger symbols, regardless of the underlying mechanism.

Filed under: family, Links, meta | Comment now »

Screensavr

By kate on March 27th, 2007

Finding a cool screensaver is hard. Just try googling it and a myriad of crappy sites fills the results, many of which give you some malware along with your free screensaver, not to mention all the blinking ads. Eventually, I had the brilliant idea to look through the archives of Life Hacker and found Slickr.

It’s a screensaver that pulls pictures from Flickr and displays them. It’s smart enough to notice when you have two monitors, and displays different pictures on each. It even tends to display similar types of pictures (two sunsets, two flowers) on each screen.

If you want, you can input tags, users, or groups to use for selecting pictures. I prefer to use “interestingness” to select pictures, which is an option. Here’s Flickr’s description of interestingness, if you care.

It’s fascinating, and always fresh. I love it.

Filed under: media, technology | Comment now »

Cool advice site

By kate on March 1st, 2007

The Elder Wisdom Circle:

It’s a network of elders who you can anonymously ask for advice on most topics (except medical, legal, and financial). You can get a personal reply from one or two elders in about a day. It helps those seeking advice, and also helps the elders by giving them a way to contribute.

I’m trying to think of a good question to ask!

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I despair for America…

By kate on February 5th, 2007

Instead of wasting hours sifting through crap and football to see the Super Bowl ads yesterday, I spent an efficient 45 minutes or so today watching and ranking them here.

MSNBC has a cool, smart interface that puts the best 32 ads into brackets and lets you watch them and advance them, all on one screen, until you’ve picked your favorite.

Then, they show you the results. I almost fell off my chair when I saw that one of the stupidest ones, “Mouse” (from Blockbuster) is WAY out in the lead. WTF? Who is watching these? Who are the people who think that’s the best of all these interesting ads? This is the same feeling I got after Bush was re-elected: bafflement and despair for my country.

My favorite, for the record, turned out to be “Ultraman” by Garmin (although if it weren’t for the bracket system, I don’t think I would have necessarily chosen that one). Other favorites included “Finger” by ETrade, “Goulet” by Emerald Nuts, and “Lions” by Taco Bell.

In an example of where America and I are on the same page, Sheryl Crow’s Revlon ad was only voted #1 by 27 (or 0%) out of 63,489 votes. Ha.

Filed under: consumerism, media, pop culture | Comment now »

Is your company hiring?

By kate on January 5th, 2007

As you have probably heard, my company laid off 60 people this week. I escaped the ax, but many of my very talented colleagues did not.

As even our CEO says, the layoffs were not because of poor performance, but a restructuring of the company’s strategy. There are now 60 great people out there, looking for jobs, who I hope will be snapped up quickly. I’m particularly interested in helping out the three guys cut from my team (IT).

If your company is looking for smart and competent IT / Operations analyst / systems engineer types, please let me know by commenting here or emailing me. Beyond that, if you’re trying to fill a position, check with me and I’ll tell you if any ex-Jobsters might fit.