I’m still at a loss what exactly happened, but it must have been a combination of bad timing on the housing company’s part, negligence on mine, and incompetence on that of the bank.

In any case, a relatively simple, brief conversation on Thursday fixed it, or so I thought: the nice lady told me the server should be back up within fifteen minutes.

You may have noticed it wasn’t, but whatever the reason, it now is.

Must be jetlag.

…make a return on this blog. I’m not fully happy with them yet, but it was high time, most of it had been implemented weeks ago, and the choice of day seemed a fitting one.

Unlike previously, comments are now written in Markdown. Having participated in reddit a lot more in the recent months, I’ve grown more fond of it, though I still disagree with some of the syntax, but more on that some other time, maybe.

On a personal note: many have asked how I’ve been doing. Work has kept me awfully busy, but mostly in a positive sense — I’d rather drain my energy doing something fulfilling than waste countless years of time doing something largely unfulfilling.

Tired of Kubrick, I decided to jump to my own design a little bit early. The new theme isn’t quite done, and you’ll notice this in two ways:

• A lot of features are missing. Most prominently, this includes search¹ and comments (both reading and submitting). Update: Search is fully back.
• Most pages are missing. Right now, only the legal page is there. There’s no “about”, which used to be a somewhat comprehensive (though incomplete) section, nor “contact”.
• Some of the layout is inconsistent. This particularly affects older articles. If you spot an article whose layout doesn’t appear to make sense (presumably, it used CSS rules that I didn’t transfer over to the new theme), let me know. For current articles, consider upgrading your browser.

Improvements – visual refresh aside – include the addition of tags (I will deprecate most categories, leaving only a handful), better handling of images (they scale to higher quality) and what I hope will be generally regarded as a less-in-your-face layout.

The site makes extensive use of CSS 3 properties, which means it won’t display quite as nicely on older browsers, but I have tried wherever possible to make things degrade nicely. Several browsers won’t support the multi-column layout, but they should degrade nicely to a single column of text. Most won’t do drop shadows underneath some of the text and images, but the site will look fine without them.

I also try to take advantage of some HTML 5 additions, such as the <header> and <footer> elements. (I’ll probably also try and let MYSTlore take advantage of HTML 5’s <video> element.) The site isn’t entirely valid at this point, but I’m getting there.

Finally, there will be a series of tabs on the top, as I showed a while ago.

Now, I realize that using CSS 3 and HTML 5 features this early makes navigating my little place on the Web ever-so-slightly less enjoyable on a regular browser, but when it comes to technology, I’ve always been the kind of guy to jump on bandwagons. (I can’t help it. )

I hope you enjoy some of the changes.

1. You actually can perform a search; there just isn’t any interface for queries yet. ↩

Good things come in threes.

First, I changed the CSS rules for the pre and code elements to account for wide code. This should make reading entries such as the previous one much more pleasant. I’d like to improve on this by adding syntax highlighting and other niceties, but this has been nagging me for a long time and I’m glad I put it behind me. It bears noting that I shamelessly copied some of the changes I made from Denis’s stylesheet. Without asking.

Second, I now have footnotes.¹ I’ve been needlessly holding off on that one as well. Kudos to the rather good (not too simple, not too fancy) WP-Footnotes.

Finally, I’ve removed the plugin statistics after a little over a month. FWIW, the result was that slightly over 16% of my readership have the DivX plug-in installed. That’s more than I had expected, even, but of course nowhere near enough. This makes Stage6 not a viable option, at least not in terms of going with it exclusively (or even primarily). And thus, the search for higher-than-junk-quality video sites continues.

The reason for the delay on the first two is that I had originally hoped to be finishing soerensays2 much sooner. It’s not that much of a priority though, and I have other more important things to worry about, so for now, it’ll be smaller, gradual updates, not a single big one.

1. Like this one! ↩

Just a heads-up that, if you experience problems posting comments, the update to negative-turing-test would be the likely cause. I find it unlikely that anything will go wrong, but you never know.

Feel free to use this post for some testing. If you can’t comment, you probably know another means of contacting me.

Thanks to Peter for his outstanding work. Also, Fafnir should be pleased his annoyance is fixed.