Time for a spring clean, even though it’s nearly the end of summer. This is a theme called freshy. I was a sucker for the shininess! I’ve had a bit of a play with the colours, but it needs some more customising, when I have more time.

[update] Sorry Christian! Let’s remember the maxim about emulation and flattery…

Dear reader,

Forgive the boring tech update, but…

If your blogroll or newsfeed is still pointing to hypertext.rmit.edu.au/~burgess, please update it to http://creativitymachine.net (blog) or http://creativitymachine.net/feed (RSS feed), cos one day not too far in the future I’ll be deleting everything from the hypertext server, including the .htaccess redirect that is automagically making it look like all the old links still work.

Aesthetic critiques and bug reports very welcome – especially if you have the misfortune to be using IE. I’m thinking I will rotate header images in an attempt to stave off the inevitable design fatigue, and hopefully keep this design for more than 6 months or however long the previous one lasted.

I’m using K2 (the new Kubrick) with my own stylesheet, as well as the weighted categories and contact form plugins.

After more than 2 years benefiting from Adrian Miles’ idea to set up a network of new media studies related blogs at hypertext.rmit.edu.au, I’ve decided to move to my own domain and server (almost at the same time as Mel did). I want to publicly thank Adrian for answering all my newbie questions about wordpress and secure ftp and goodness knows what else, and although I’m moving off the network, I’m still in the neighbourhood.

I was going to muck around with new templates and directories and things before making the announcement, but in the process of ftp-ing all over the place I somehow broke the .htaccess file at the old server. I couldn’t fix it and the old blog was horribly, horribly broken – so I ended up just writing a new .htaccess file with nothing but the following permanent redirect thingy in it: Redirect permanent /~burgess http://creativitymachine.net

Which will hopefully redirect all permalinks (i.e. google searches) permanently to this new domain. I can’t believe it worked, I feel like a hacker.

You’ll still need to update your bookmarks and feed subscriptions though.

My life since the last wordpress upgrade, which was only about 6 weeks ago i think:

# Total Spam Caught: 9212 (average karma: -969.9)
# Total Comments Approved: 77 (average karma: 15.18)
# Total Comments Moderated: 130

My life before the upgrade was pretty much like:

#Total Spam Caught: 0 (nothing to catch them with that worked with our php installation, or that I could make work)
# Total Comments Approved: 77 (after moderation, see below)
# Total Comments Moderated By Hand and With the Aid of Every Swear Word in English and Some Other Languages as Well: 9212

Happy now.

Now that I’m back from the UK, and then back from Melbourne, and about to go even more into overdrive: time for a redesign. Naturally.

That is, it was time. I didn’t have time, but did it anyway. Thoughts?

So apparently, this template is all wonky in Explorer on Windows, with text disappearing into the margins etc, even though it looks fine in every other f***king browser. I only discovered this when viewing it from a PC on campus.

So, dear readers, can you leave a comment if it looks wrong from where you are, and leave your specs (browser, OS, screen res if you want). I’ll try to work out how to fix the css when I get a chance.

If you’ve manually added my RSS feed to your aggregator, please update it to this one. Or, if you use bloglines:

This has to be the end of the geek talk for today!

OK, here’s a quick and dirty version of my brand new WordPress blog. That banner image is just something I whipped up, there are things that really irritate me about this template (just hover over the title of this post, for example) that I need more CSS nightshift time on. Took me a while to get file permissions set up correctly, and blogrolling won’t export a usable OPML file for me (or, WP won’t import it), so I had to use their javascript after all. Plus, I have to find out how to redirect all my old permalinks to the appropriate WP pages, but apart from that, everything went OK.

I’m smiling, see:

Thanks, Adrian for putting up with a barrage of emails that were redundant as soon as I did my own troubleshooting.

Update: I’ve just figured out that the annoying ‘tooltips’ that pop up when you mouseover links is something called “nicetitle”, done with css and/or javascript. Can anyone tell me how to make it go away? I don’t like it.

Update: Looks like I made it go away by changing the z-index to -20? [bemused shrug] That is, I think i broke the nicetitle.css file. Being incompetent comes in handy sometimes. Must…stop…playing…with…blog and do Real Work…

Update: Just noticed the layout doesn’t work properly in stupid Internet Explorer – the sidebar disappears down to the bottom of the page. I’ll try to fix it, later – – turns out the problem was long category names in the dropdown box in the sidebar – I just changed them to shorter names and now it works. But, really, since it looks perfect in Firefox, Safari, and even Opera – maybe get a better browser?

I just installed wordpress, and am now migrating….cross your fingers. And say, bye bye design, hello big blue thing at the top!