The design here is like the weather in Texas, if you don’t like it, wait five minutes for it to change again. Comments are appreciated! RSS users yawn and don’t even notice…

Update: I’ve gotten some comments that it looks a lot like Metafilter, and I see the similarities, mainly with the background color and story titles. The actual inspiration for this was that I ran across a page I did last year for a scholarship contest. I liked the way the black and blue looked, and as soon as I got some time I whipped this up. On second examination, the similarities are really superficial, and I think I’m going to stick with this design for a while. I’m going to try and tweak it though so the date/title to text offset isn’t so similar to Mefi. Any thoughts? The reactions so far have been positive.

As you have probably noticed by now, the menu looks quite different than it did before. The markup is still exactly the same, it’s just the lists have been styled with CSS to make them appear more like a navigation menu and less like, well, lists. I have also coded a new feature that when the less frequently updated sections of the site get updated or have a new item added, that menu item will be emphasized for twenty-four hours. Let me know any thoughts on the new updates.

Thanks to Mike for pointing out a problem with the comments. While debugging it, I rediscovered what a mess the b2 comment code is, but I’ve cleaned things up quite a bit now. Why is everything done through an included file? Why can’t you show comments, pingbacks, and even trackbacks at the same time? Just adding things to my personal TODO. Comments are now part of an ordered list, though it’s styled so they look normal. When I was working on the comments it got me thinking about the whole FOAF and PGP comment integration stuff. It’s just a matter of time. Emails are never shown, no matter what.

Just a small request, if you have any links here on your blogroll or link list with the www. prefix, if you could change that to be just photomatt.net I would really appreciate it. I’m not sure how Google is going to handle the 301 Redirect Permanent headers so any help you can give will certainly smooth things over. Old permalinks and such, being permanent, will of course always work. Previously the “www” prefix was simply an alias that worked identically to just the hostname. I’ve come to consider this redundant; yes this page is on the “World Wide Web.” Actually in terms of user experience this change should be completely transparent, except I think I’m going to lose a lot of Google juice because of it—photomatt.net has a PageRank of 4; www.photomatt.net had a PageRank of 6 and was reindexed fairly frequently.

I’ve torn everything down and started from scratch. As a result things might look a little Spartan for a few days, but is that really a bad thing? The new PhotoMatt.net will run faster, jump higher, and post your comments before you think of them.

PhotoMatt.net is now available in four syndication formats. I admit to being totally new to this sort of thing, and the feeds have really only been tested in my copy of Syndirella, which is quickly becoming one of my favorite programs. They all validate but there might be other issues I’m not aware of. Enjoy! Oh and I apologize for the look of the site right now, I started working on it and then became quite distracted.

Well all the cool kids are doing it ;). No actually, I’m starting to get back to the site in flux idea that I was attached to in the beginning. Before I had a home-brew theme system and I was committed to adding a new theme every month and making it the default for that month. As I added new features though it became cumbersome updating the different themes, and it was slowing me down when I was trying to add functionality. So I came to the decision that it was better to have one well-tweaked theme that worked perfectly with everything, rather than twenty themes that worked alright. I’m itching for a new design, plus I have some things to fix up around here, so it’s going to be a meta-day. Also to be honest I like having total control on how the site is displayed, which is why NS4 users see just text and other things, which is different then some sites that let you write your own CSS file even. There’s a lot to do, so I should probably make a list:

• New design
  • Resizable fonts (no pixels for IE/Win)
  • External links differentiated
  • Something new with fancy cap stuff
• RSS feedsDone
• Finish archive system
• Set up CVS (maybe gforge too?)
• Install stereoI’m happy to say I think everyone in the neighborhood has heard it now
• New intra-site link systyem
• Improve error handling throughout
• Install new RAID card and hard drives
• Set up file-server
• Try new battery in laptopThe new battery is nice, but the problem still appears to be the charging circuitry, just like I told them.

I think that’s enough for today.

Final answer: most common starting words are “I”, “Well”, “The”, “It”, “This”, “There”, “Okay”, and “Just”. Most common first letters were I, T, W, A, O, S, M, and then J and H tied. I feel like I’m in a episode of Sesame Street. I’ve decided to add all this neatness to the Zeitgeist so you can check out the full list, updated live with the latest content, there.

Well I ran some regexes through all the posts in database hoping to clean them up a bit, and got rid of all the instances where I was starting with an unnecesary paragraph tag, now that it’s all taken care of automatically. I also took out some things so my RSS feed should be cleaner now, or at least if I ever offer the old stuff up for syndication. I think I’ve reached the limit of what I can do with pure SQL, so I think I’m going to patch something together in PHP one of these nights. I basically just need to do the same thing except maybe strip_tags first. Then I can modify that to find if there’s any pattern to the words I start out with. How exciting!!! Hold on to your seats:

+--------+-------+
| letter | count |
+--------+-------+
| I | 116 |
| < | 65 |
| T | 49 |
| W | 42 |
| A | 17 |
| O | 14 |
| S | 13 |
| J | 10 |
| Y | 9 |
| M | 9 |
| H | 9 |
| F | 7 |
| D | 6 |
| C | 4 |
| G | 4 |
| E | 4 |
| L | 4 |
| B | 3 |
| P | 3 |
| N | 3 |
| V | 2 |
| . | 1 |
| U | 1 |
| " | 1 |
| 9 | 1 |
+--------+-------+
25 rows in set (0.00 sec)

(Of course I don’t really think that’s exciting.)