Alieniloquent

You may have noticed that my layout changed a little. I got rid of my Google ads.

I’ve noticed that when I paste code snippets or other bits of pre-formatted text that is narrower than 80 columns, I still get a horizontal scroll. That was because my content area was simply too narrow. I intend to be posting more code, so I started looking for ways to get some space.

Changing the layout to only have one column on the right was a start. I was simply going to move the google ads down, but then Erica asked me how much money I was making off of them. The answer is not much at all. So I just got rid of them entirely.

So I decided to start a pod cast. Check it out: The Agile Mac.

So I’ve been thinking about starting some sort of periodic content: perhaps a regular themed article here or a podcast. I would like to take advantage of what readers I do have to see what people would like to hear me talk about.

Here are some topics that I’ve thought about doing:

• Things about programming they don’t teach you in college
• Agile methods
• Test-first design
• Refactoring
• Cocoa programming
• Ruby programming
• Lisp programming

There’s no particular order to those, as I find them all very interesting. It’s possible that I could end up doing a mishmash of all of them.

Please leave a comment with a topic you’d like to hear me talk about!

So I was looking up an actual dictionary definition of “alieniloquent” today. I had one at some time in the past, but it’s a hard word to find in dictionaries, and that’s why I picked it for my domain. I finally found this website, the Grandiloquent Dictionary, and it has my word in it.

alieniloquent

Speaking discursively or straying from one’s point.

So for those of you who were wondering, there you go.

Erica has been doing this sort of thing for a while, but I haven’t been into my site enough to really care.  Now that I’m doing more with my site, I decided it was time to get on the bandwagon.  I’ve added some advertisements over on the far right column, and I’ll see how I feel about it in a month or two.  I’ll probably add some Amazon items and maybe other stuff too.

Well, it only took me one night. I’ll probably be tweaking for weeks now, but I got the main thrust of theming done.

I really have to compliment the Wordpress guys. Setting up a theme for their system can be as easy or as difficult as the particular designer wants. Their theme system is definitely the way to go for live blog redesigns, though: I could switch back to the other theme with a couple of mouse clicks. Very easy.

Let me know what you think of the design.

For those who actually read my site at my site, please pardon my mess.  I’m redesigning my site, and I have much less regard for how it looks than some, so I’m just going to piddle with it live.

On the up side, if you’re the kind that obsessively refreshes my blog, you can see how I design web pages.

Between my trash folder and cached copies of my pages on Google, I was able to recover all of the content I had deleted. I took advantage of this opportunity to redesign the site.

I made a new design, and I like this one much better anyway. So, it all ended well in the end.

I’ve been waffling about trying Typo as my blogging engine. But, I ended up coming to the same conclusion I came last time I switched away from Wordpress.

I don’t care enough about my blog to code for it. So I don’t need to blog with Ruby, because I’m not going to be coding for my blog. So, I’ve done what I should have done a long time ago: I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress.

The posting interface certainly is sexy. It also comes with a plugin for spam filtering out of the box, so I don’t need the one I was using any more. The primary reason I did this, though, is that I’m going to be getting into making a new template for my blog to integrate with the rest of the site, and I wanted to be on the latest version for the templating stuff.