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December 14, 2008#

Words are worth a thousand pictures?

The photos on this blog are temporarily unavailable.

Despite my long-held belief that NO software program works really well prior to version 4.0, I rather brazenly went ahead and upgraded to WordPress version 2.7 only a few days following its release. For some reason I expected the upgrade to be a snap, but between me not seeing the instructions where you are told to disable all plug-ins in advance of this upgrade, inadvertently blowing away my old server files without a complete back-up, and making lots of changes to my child theme. Well. I’ve managed to hose the visual editor, the media library, and broken all my photo links. Prowling around the web, I see that I am not alone in some cases, and there may be bugs, plug-in conflicts, etc. not just pilot error. My current theory is that because I did not disable WP-SuperCache prior to install, I have got something stuck in database pergatory.

Anyhow, I’m going to let a bit of time pass before I try to sort out the photo/plug-in/visual editor issues and hope that some solution emerges on the WordPress forums.

Eventually this will be a visual blog. Really!

December 13, 2008#

Hello world!

My first post is destined to be a technology one, I guess. I’ve invested some time to get to know the state of the art on blogging tools, and find that like so many others I am smitten with WordPress. Fantastic tool. I have learned just enough CSS to be dangerous. Not that hard for me since I know PostScript, and CSS concepts are very similar. No doubt WordPress will go more towards a WYSIWG interface overtime, as I see folks are adding such features to their premium theme dashboards. I predict it will evolve into the next generation publishing program. Look out InDesign.

I also want to give a nod to Ian Stewart and his “Thematic” theme framework. Such a beautiful job of separating form from content. Almost thrilling to use after slogging through the creation of HTML sites in Dreamweaver. I easily built my old child theme called “Derivamatic” for this blog. I wanted a clean, minimal design that still reflects my color sensibility.

The state of web typography is still rather woeful. It makes me sad to not be able to use all the wonderful typefaces in my library. Access to type libraries seems to be the technology/legal gatekeeper. I know the folks at the W3C CSS committee are trying to work on this topic. I also found a fledgling effort called typeface.js but I haven’t had the bandwidth to play with it yet. I believe the folks at WordPress have a shot at solving the web typography problem, should they choose to work on the font licensing/embedding issue. Clearly they could perpetuate a core set of typefaces fairly easily via their platform. And that would be very nice. Remember the Postscript “core 35″?

Anyway, it’s been fun to play with this, and now that I have my own blog, I suppose I will have a good excuse for learning more.

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