New Links

I've added a bevy of new links to the sidebar (if you can't see it, click on Home in the top bar). They are mainly various Open Source resources, including the unofficial LibreOffice web forums, which considering The Document Foundations unwillingness to provide a web forum itself, is something that the LibreOffice community should support. Mozilla (Firefox, Thunderbird, etc.) users had to create their own web forums too in the form of mozillaZine.

How do you know a mainstream media article is on Drudge?

When all, or nearly all, of the comments attached to said article are contentless right-wing boilerplate. That just doesn't happen normally.

And yes, Biden was asleep.

Tip: Adding a unlinked Menu to the WordPress Navbar

If you want to have an item on the navbar that is purely a menu and not also a link, add a custom link with any old url in it and then edit the item and delete it. Then you can put anything you want under it in the Custom Menu interface and the now-empty link will act purely as a menu heading.

WordPress.org getting WordPress.com features

through Jetpack. Nothing there looks too compelling to me, but it's nice to see anyway. Not to mention that there's more to come.

I love Disqus

I really like having all my comments on various sites in one place. It makes following discussions really easy. I have added Disqus comments on this blog as well, not that I get much in the way of commenters at this time. As a webmaster I particularly love the Twitter and Facebook integration, making it easy for anyone to comment without having to allow unregistered commenters (which I currently do since this blog has such minute traffic).

Wordpress.com leaves much to be desired

It's mystifying that the service is so popular considering that it is ridiculously locked-down* and upsells you on things that Blogger gives for free. No user-specified JavaScript, even in sidebar widgets (which means no Sitemeter, no Disqus, etc.), no editing templates, and of course no plugins. To edit CSS, you need to pay them $14.97 a year. To add a custom domain, you need to pay them $12 per year if you have the domain registered somewhere else and $17. If you want no ads on your blog, you need to pay them a whopping $29.97 a year. All of which come standard in Blogger; the ability to edit CSS has been there since at least 2003 (or was it 2004) when I started my first blog and the lack of ads has been there since shortly after Google bought them. And they've always let you add ads, something that Wordpress.com won't do no matter what you pay them (assuming you don't have a special elite account not available to the public).

Best to either use Blogger or do what I did and get a cheap webhosting account and run real Wordpress with fully editable themes, the ability to install new themes yourself, the ability to add JavaScript anywhere, and the ability to add plugins galore. The ability to install new themes is particularly important considering that Wordpress themes in general either a) suck or b) are appropriate only in very specific purposes. Finding a good general Wordpress theme is like looking for a diamond in the rough. The 106 free themes they allow you simply doesn't cut it.

*Speaking of locked down, way back when it first started I began the process of migrating to Wordpress.com from Blogger. I found a 3-column theme I liked, I think it was one of the Andreas ones, but the way the items were displayed on the left sidebar didn't match the way they were displayed on the right sidebar. I discovered a hack using a text-box that allowed me to make them match. Within an hour or two (!) the theme was altered so that my hack didn't work. Because of the timing, I believed, and still believe, that they saw what I did and changed the theme just to break my simple display hack. I immediately gave up my migration plans. That is a level of control-freakery I won't put up with.

Update: That last paragraph was written from memory. I have since managed to dig up a contemporaneous post I wrote on my Blogger blog (which is long since gone, as is the account it was on: thank you Internet Archive!). The post is copied below the fold:

WordPress Themes Lacking

WordPress needs a better system for bringing aesthetically high-quality themes to the top. Last night I spent quite some time wading through a huge ocean of stylistic catastrophes finding nothing that I liked.

I guess part of the problem is that WordPress lacks any kind of WYSIWYG theme editing (aside from placing widgets). If you're not proficient with CSS, you're screwed. I guess I'll have to load that CSS book onto my Kindle and brush up.

Update: Okay, there is a theme editor in the works, but it explicitly states that it's not ready for prime time yet. Unfortunately, it seems that development is currently stalled with the last updates being last Spring. There is always this really old webapp, but it seems very limited in the sort of themes it can generate.

Changes at Daedaleus.com

As my readers have already no doubt noticed, or would have if they existed yet, my blog has undergone a change. That's because I moved from the free DreamHostApps account I was using to a paid webhosting account at WebFaction. I chose a new theme after running into some trouble tracking down the old one (which wasn't that great anyway). I plan to tweak this one heavily in the coming months, so bear with me.

As always, feel free to leave comments. The blogrolls should be recreated soon also.