As you may have no doubt already noticed — assuming you’re not just reading the RSS feed — things look different around here.  A couple of months in the making, my own personal redesign of the default template for WordPress is complete.  The code isn’t always necessarily pretty and needs to be cleaned up a little on the backend, but the results are still good, I think.

Let me know what you think.  Let me know if you find any bugs.  Yes, I know that the sidebar doesn’t extend all the way to the bottom of the front page, but that doesn’t bother me all that much.  I could fix it easily enough, though, if there’s an outcry against that white space on the bottom half.  Also, the comments page doesn’t have the sidebar at all.  I’ll likely be adding that back in one of these days.  Right now, I just want to get this thing live.

If there’s any weirdness in the formatting you notice, please let me know in the comments section, preferably with your OS and browser noted.  I designed this in Firefox.  It looks best there.  It looks mostly the same in IE, but it really sings in Firefox.

The really funny thing is that I was playing with some color setting just before I uploaded this design and already have an idea for the next modification.  This redesign business can just suck up all your time if you’re not careful.  But I really do like the next idea I have in mind — plus, it’ll be timely by the time I do it.  That’s all I’ll say for now.

I forgot to make mention of it on the blog, but last week’s Various and Sundry DVD Podcast never happened. I had a minor technical issue — audio mixer power brick death — that prevented me from recording anything. It got fixed in a couple of days, but by then my schedule prevented me from recording anything. Special thanks to Clay over at The Guitar Center for helping me find exactly what I needed in a store so cluttered that I’d never find it otherwise.

I should have a new VnS DVD Podcast for you this week covering both this week’s releases as well as last week’s. Funny enough, it might be the last podcast of the year.

In other news, I have three podcasts going up on the Pipeline Podcast feed this week. The first one went up last night, with another tomorrow night, and a third on either Wednesday or Thursday. Full details for that will be up in tomorrow’s Pipeline Commentary and Review column.

Full explanation over at iFanboy.

And don’t forget to Digg me, while you’re at it.  That’s right — I can now be Dugg.  Wild.

The auctions finish tonight!  Check ‘em out and bid while you can.  The prices are ludicrously low right now, even if you count postage:

• Apollo 13
• Punch Drunk Love
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
• Samurai Jack 

A quick note to those who use RSS feeds from this website:

If you’re having any problems with them, try these addresses in your RSS Feed Reader client of choice:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/VariousAndSundry http://feeds.feedburner.com/CommentsForVariousAndSundry  

With the help of a plug-in for the blogging software, I was able to move my feeds over to FeedBurner nearly seamlessly.  Unfortunately, I’ve still had a report or two of people losing the feed.  So there’s your solution — use those URLs instead. Thanks.

I’m looking at my website stats this morning and I see something interesting:

There are no less than a half dozen episodes of the Various and Sundry DVD Podcast that are being downloaded about 200 times apiece this month.  To me, the podcast was always disposable — it’s meant to be listened to the week it comes out.  That’s about it.  After that, there’s very little use for it. It’s not even worth archiving for historical purposes.  I don’t get it.

But someone is listening.  About 200 – to a podcast that died a couple of months ago.

Should I bring it back? Maybe it’s worth doing a trial run of four weeks or so.  Since DVD listings are available far in advance, I could even record them all in one shot and release them weekly from there.

No promises, but let me know what you think.

In other podcasting news, I’m doing another interview with a pro this evening for next week’s Pipeline Podcast.  And no, I’m not naming names yet, but I’ll try to put out an excerpt over the weekend on that feed.

I really shouldn’t bother showing this, but I have nothing else to blog about today. Lucky you.

I’ve mentioned in the past here that I’ve been working on a redesign of the blog for a month or more. Well, I haven’t worked on it much lately, and am scrapping the whole thing. I’m starting over from scratch, but I’ve learned so much in the last month that the next attempt should go much more quickly and look much better.

I’m going to show you a screenshot here of the first attempt at a redesign. There’s a lot still wrong with it. (The blue border is supposed to be white, for starters.) There’s a lot of temporary place-holders I threw in there while I worked on the code. This is a work in progress, in other words, and never would have been the final design. But it gives you an idea of some of the things I was playing with.

My next design attempt will stay away from the brown, and likely trend back to a blue color theme.

And if you think this looks ugly – you should see how IE rendered it. Forget the standards non-compliance of the browser for a moment; Even the colors looked different. Bizarre.

Screen grab is available after the break, due to non-compliant IE coding crap:

Den ganzen Beitrag lesen…

I’m sorry to say that it appears Internet Explorer users can’t access this site today.

No, I don’t have a clue as to why that is. The source code is all there, but the page comes up blank. Those of you lucky enough to use Firefox, though, are in good shape. And I imagine those of you reading this on an RSS feed reader are safe, as well.

I don’t know when this will be corrected, but I’m working on it when I can.

Nevermind: All fixed.  Turned out to be a TITLE tag at the top of the header file that was accidentally commented out.  IE treats it as a showstopper.  Firefox doesn’t care.  Ah, the glories of XHTML.  If you see anything else awry, please let me know.

I installed a new spam blocker for WordPress this evening.  It’s called Bad Behavior, and you can find a link to it right at the bottom of this page.

If, for any reason, you think it’s preventing you from posting a comment to this blog, please let me know.  Drop me an e-mail at augie (at) variousandsundry (dot) com and I’ll look into it.

I always get a little nervous about automatic spam prevention due to false positives, so let’s cross our fingers that this one works out.  Thanks!

I talked a little about logos for this site last week. I’m working on a new one, myself, for a little site redesign I’ve been dreaming up lately. In digging through the archives, though, I came across another one I used to use. I like it. Simple, dignified, and it fit the color scheme at the time:

It’s a lot better than this older one:

Yesterday’s link dump was post #4000.

Sort of. The number includes all the blog entries that I created, but never posted and deleted. It includes stories that were eventually merged into others.

But, still, I’ve done somewhere just shy of 4000 entries to this blog now. That’s not counting the 750 or so on the politics blog, which gets updated every now and again these days. Overall, I’m pushing 5000 since I started this blog four years ago.

Speaking of which: I missed my Fourth Blogiversary a couple of weeks ago.

Time flies.

Heh, I just looked back at some of those early entries. In #9, I was convinced that Jason was going to win BIG BROTHER 3, and that Lisa was next to be voted out. Whoops.

Let me quote myself from that entry:

“Oh, and Will was entertaining. Will saved BB2 and the entire franchise, particularly post-Chicken George.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Once upon a time, I went to one of those sites that offers to do a logo for you on the cheap. I wanted to try something new with Various and Sundry, so I gave them carte blanche to come up with something fun.

They came back with this:

And that’s why it hasn’t been seen at this website until today. No, it’s not going to be this site’s logo anytime soon.

I could go Web 2.0 trendy and use this one:

Back to the drawing board. . .

• Here’s some more info about the new [tag]Weird Al[/tag] album has shown up at Ain’t It Cool News. It includes a much easier link to the lead video, animated by Bill [tag]Plympton[/tag], plus a breakdown of the other animated music videos including on the Dual Disc release of the album.

As a diabetic, I’m thrilled that Al is doing a song about a [tag]pancreas[/tag]. =)

• Hands on with the new [tag]Tivo3 [/tag]box. Looks spiffy!

• Is it [tag]iTunes[/tag] 7 we’ll see today, amongst other announcements from [tag]Apple[/tag]? (iTunes Store is down as I write this. . .)

• Forget a hybrid car — buy a wind [tag]turbine[/tag] from Amazon!

• Have I mentioned yet that I’m on [tag]MySpace[/tag] now? Or that you can get to The Pipeline Podcast shownotes now directly through ThePipelinePodcast.com?

• An inflatable iceberg for your pool. Not cheap, but really friggin’ cool looking!

• New DVD and DS Lite release list coming a little later today . . .

I’ll be over here in the San Diego area at the San Diego Comic-Con or, as they like us to refer to it today, “Comic-Con International: San Diego.” I’ll be part of a large-ish team covering the con from all angles for Comic Book Resources, and hope to be doing daily write-ups and podcasts while I’m out there.

Here’s a huge satellite pic of San Diego that’s a few years old now. Only half the convention center is there, and the Padres’ new stadium isn’t even built yet. But the detail is spectacular. (Warning for dial-up users: It’s a big file.)

In case you haven’t noticed, the Various and Sundry DVD Podcast hasn’t gone up this week, nor will it. I never recorded one, which makes it tough to post one. The podcast will return next week at some point with an announcement of some sort.

How’s that for a series of vague generalities, masquerading as a blog post?

Great. Now I’ve gone meta.