Site news

So, the blog looks a little different. I've been debating a rename for quite a while - to usher in the new year, and to generally cause people to give me fewer strange looks. "Mental Borborygmus" appealed to my taste for imagery and pompous vocabulary, but as usually happens when I indulge this kind of impulse, didn't work out in the end.

Also, I like this stylesheet. Very clean.

Anyhow...

Evie's taking a nap now, and Heather is off doing Black Friday shopping, so it's a good time to step back and say "hi".

Well, the site has had some issues. First, my account got suspended for improperly high server utilization (CPU or memory). Unfortunately, the hosting company cannot let me know what particular thing was consuming the server resources. So, I had to complain, and they turned it back on.

Also, because the previous version had a security exploit, I upgraded the blog from version 0.8.3 to version 0.9.1. This should be a more stable blog now. As you can tell, I am experimenting with the look and feel of the blog as well.

Heather changed the theme on the picture gallery. I love it - "butterfly" has been one of our nicknames for Evelyn since she was just a slight tremor of movement inside Heather, and I love calling her that. It ranks up there with "itsy bit" and "Evie bear".

The overhaul of the site is now finished. With a few seconds here and there, I have been working on finishing up the final redesign of the site. The new wiki using PM Wiki is installed, and is the best one yet. I have changed the theme on the gallery to match the overall clean-white site theme that I am going with. Feedback is welcome, comment on this article if you have an opinion.

Incidentally, because giving credit mitigates the accusation of plagiarism, the logo image was stolen from Turboread. And I stole the background from James, a co-worker of mine, who got it from someone else.

Now that the aesthetics are all done, I hope to be able to blog a bit sometime soon.

Well, as you can see, the site has had a makeover. I have been contemplating this for some time, and while I was not planning on having it happen for months, the simultaneous crash of the blog earlier this morning (due to user error, i.e. me poking because I couldn't get back to sleep) and the release of a security exploit for this blog software both forced me to upgrade.

In the process I lost my blogrolls, so I will need to reconstruct those. Sigh. I also need to reload the images I have and reassociate them with the categories they represent.

I figured out the issue, and it has returned.

In the mean time, look at the latest in office pranks.

Due to an unexpected error, the Gallery has been deleted. I am working on having the hosting company restore it from backups. Hopefully it should be back soon.

I am jazzed that both Heather and my dad are now contributing to the gallery. I also finally imported all of the pictures from the previous gallery instance with the botched upgrade, so our London trip photos etc. are all now back online.

Welcome to all from Northern Crown! The new blogger's thrill for appearing on someone else's blogroll remains a thrill.

So, you may notice in the blogrolls to the right there are entries called "aggregator" with a different symbol next to them. I have installed a software package called rawdog, which is an "RSS Aggregator Without Delusions Of Grandeur". It threads blogs together by date. I am finding it a much easier interface for reading significant numbers of blogs, much easier than the many-at-a-time concept that Bloglines operates on.

Kinja operates on the same concept, but I enjoy the ability to administrate my own.

Althouse prompted me to cull my blogroll for blogs that I no longer read. I just don't read Belgravia Dispatch, Blogicus, Power Line, and Right Wing News, and so I deleted them. Also, Diplomad sadly goes by the way-side, as he has retired from blogging.

I added Captain's Quarters, Chrenkoff, Decision '08, and Tech Central Station.

I also added a separate box for the Old Dominion Blog Alliance. I am not a member, but I do track the sayings of these folks fairly closely. I shifted Commonwealth Conservative & Reason & Revelation over to it, and added Sic Semper Tyrannis, Bacon's Rebellion, Valley Republican, Reporterette, and One Man's Trash.

I've gotten the Wiki up and running, and I think I really like this iteration of it. I have also upgraded the Picture Gallery software to a functioning version. I've detailed what versions of everything I am running in the About page on the wiki. The pictures from the old gallery got lost in the transition, but I will have them back and populated soon.

For links to the Wiki and Pictures, see the "Nmj3e" section under the calendar on the upper right.

I've added site icons, as you can see. Many of them I shamelessly stole from Kuro5hin, others were ripped off from various parts of the web and such. I am not using this site for any kind of profit-making venture, and I hope the tolerance of folks is not tested by this blatant thievery.

I have also added little snippets over in the "Effluvia" section to the right to some blogosphere widgets from Technorati and the Truth Laid Bare Blog Ecosystem.

So, I have deleted Porphyrogenitus because of inactivity, and added Althouse, the National Taxpayers Union, Right Wing News, Cox & Forkum a blog by an editorial cartoonist,

I am definitely unsatisfied with my current content management system, MediaWiki. I started using it after trying TikiWiki. But I am definitely not quite happy - the ability not to enable file viewing permissions is a tad irritating. It's much cleaner, but definitely not as featureful.

It's too bad I couldn't get Confluence...

Good morning.

I have a daughter. She isn't born yet - that will happen in May. But she is there, and I feel her kick sometimes, growing.

So, I feel a need to blog. To write. To document my world, for little Evelyn. She will grow up, and be curious about this world. The more I write down, the better.

So, Evie, if you are reading this from the future... your Daddy loves you.