The Core Dump

Since obviously the problem with the Internet today is that there just isn’t enough Nic on it, I’ve taken it upon myself to fix this oversight.

Yes, my children, I do it for you. And I take cash. Group hug.

But seriously, one of the cool “new” things around is what’s known as a tumblelog, defined by Wikipedia as

a variation of a blog, that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, this format is frequently used to share the author’s creations, discoveries, or experiences without providing a commentary.

Nifty, eh? Sort of blogging lite. After some time looking around for various engines to run a tumblelog, decided to go with a hosted solution called Tumblr, which apart from the now gag-inducing vowel-deficiency is really, really slick. The always-excellent Lifehacker has a nice write-up about the service.

The secret weapon for Tumblr is the “Share on Tumblr” bookmarklet, which after you drag it to your bookmarks menu makes it super easy to blast off fast posts about the things you’ve found. Exceptionally slick.

Like the crap marketer I am, I’ve buried the link to my own creation at the end of the post: It’s called More Core because I’m pretty hilarious like that. Check it out, why don’t you?

Note that More Core (snort!) folds in my RSS feeds from del.icio.us, Flickr, and shared items from Google Reader, so it’s a bit of an über-site.

Hope you get a chance to check it out and that it’s enjoyable. Hopefully there will be much spew.

Soundtrack: Ethel on XM Satellite

It’s been bothering me for a long time to run other peoples’ themes on my little squat in cyberspace, and since I had the day off yesterday to ponder presidentialness, the little OCD voice in my head kept yammering at me to actually get off my duff and make a theme.

For this theme, I decided to act on my conviction that this whole color thing is a fad. Monochrome FTW!

At this point it’s pretty much just a hack-and-slash job on the WordPress default theme, Kubrick.

The original Kubrick you’ve seen all over the web.

Turns out that Kubrick isn’t the most disciplined and straightforward thing you ever saw, but nothing the web inspector in WebKit can’t help you sort out. I love that thing.

Soundtrack: Hear Music on XM Satellite

Spent some time upgrading zer blog to the hot-off-the-press WordPress 2.1. Massive kudos to the WordPress theme for creating a platform that is so easy to muck with.

When coupled with the deliciousness that is MacFUSE, the upgrade was eerily close to pleasant. (Please don’t give me a wedgie.)

Thanks to both the WordPress and Google crews for Making Computers Suck Less.

Soundtrack: Ethel on XM Satellite

As part of the general theme-changing nerditry, I went ahead and installed the awesomely super-plus good Lightbox created by Lokesh Dhakar. If you’re not familiar with it, Lightbox makes images open up inside the current browser window, darkens the non-image area and puts the focus on the image through a really nice border effect.

It’s the kind of stuff JavaScript was put on this planet to do.

Using it on a WordPress blog has been made utterly drool-proof by Safirul Alredh, who wrapped up Lightbox in a WordPress plugin. Brilliant and appreciated.

The things that are happening on the web these days are blowing my mind…

To see it in action, just click on the picture below.

Andrea and yours truly on the patio. Click for larger version.

Soundtrack: BassDrive

It was time for The Core Dump to have another facelift—it is after all getting on in years. Nothing against Lush which remains gorgeous, if a little intense.

Out of the almost ridiculous amount of themes for wordpress out there, Cutline caught my eye, and a few quick tweaks later, it is now the skin The Core Dump has crawled into. Nice and simple, fast to load. Check it out, why don’t you, and let me know what you think…

Soundtrack: The System on XM Satellite

Got a chuckle out of this at breakfast today:

Click for full-size version.

It’s funny ’cause it’s true.

From Pearls Before Swine.

Who loves WordPress widgets?

I do! I do!

You gotta hand it to the WordPress crew—they’re making their product better all the time. The latest goodness is widgets. Basically widgets are plug-ins for the sidebar. If your theme supports widgets, you can download and plug away and all kind of things can show up in the sidebar. Brilliant. So now this blog sports del.icio.us and Flickr—as the last nerd on Earth, I ended up creating a Flickr account—and all that other kind of stuff any self-respecting blog must have in the sidebar.

The masthead on the blog now sports the broadcaster guy again, so it’s probably fair to say that the migration to the Lush theme is finished.

One strange thing is that for some reason you can’t configure widgets while the Lush theme is selected. The workaround is to switch to another theme, configure the widgets, then switch back to Lush. Kind of odd, but that’s life in the big city, I guess.

Soundtrack: Stream from Groove Salad

One of the impetuses for The Typo Upgrade That Didn’t was to bring Typo to a version that could run Marco van Hylckama Vieg’s fantastic Lush theme.

Turns out that Christoph Boecken has done the grunt work and converted the goodness to WordPress, so that’s the skin The Core Dump is sporting now. Hot diggety it looks nice.

Big thanks to Marco for creating the theme and to Christoph for converting it and bringing the AJaxy goodness along.

Soundtrack: Stream from Groove Salad

It looks like the WordPress migration of this site is now complete—old posts have been imported, links have been fixed, and in general things look pretty good.

If you’re reading this in a feed reader, do swing by and check out the new look. It’s a theme called Hemingway. Pretty spiffy, I must say. Black is the new … ehm … black?

In order to migrate the old posts, I had fired up the coffee maker and dusted off my Perl books in anticipation of having to write a script to get the articles out from the Typo database, but bless the heart of whoever wrote the RSS import script for WordPress: Just a matter of generating a massive feed of all posts in the Typo database and then import that feed. Et voila! The process took a while, but as long as it’s the computer doing the hard work and not me, that’s not a problem.

Time to enjoy the rest of the weekend…

Soundtrack: Stream from Groove Salad

The Core Dump is now powered by WordPress, after a Typo upgrade went spectacularly wrong. Although that was more of an impetus for change—I’d been eyeing WordPress for a while, and decided that rather than roll back to an earlier rev of Typo, why not just go ahead and test the waters a bit?

In a way it’s kind of nice to start over with a clean slate, and to have an opportunity to rework the site and de-cruftify things a bit.

So far the article feed URL has been brought over, so if you’re reading through an aggregator, things should Just Work. The comments feed, on the other hand, is in the wind, so if you care about that, you need to resubscribe.

Lots to do to bring old posts over and set up all the niggling little details.