Welcome

Posted on January 2, 2008
Filed Under Blog |

Welcome to the replacement for my old blog Mormon Metaphysics. Sorry for the delay. The main problem has been simply been ridiculously busy with family and setting up a new business while working the old. The second problem was that I’d originally set up the blog with Drupal. However I found that I was doing so much tweaking and coding that I eventually just through my hands up in frustration and deleted the whole thing. This one is done with Wordpress in an evening.I’m still not entirely happy yet. The style sheet annoys me. I really want the middle column to be anchored on the left and expand on the right. Originally I was just modifying a theme. But I really ought just do so clean up to the style sheets and do it right.But I just wanted to get something that worked.Things I’m still working on. (And yes, this is still a work in progress) The nice little random philosophy quote in the upper right. I had this working in Drupal but haven’t done much with it in Word Press. I’m sure I can do some quick PHP programming if I need to.Anyway, here we are. If you see the blog look funny over the next few days that’s because I’m still working on it.

Comments

17 Responses to “Welcome”

I should add, that despite the flaws, it kind of got to the “the perfect is the enemy of the good” stage. So it was time to get something working.

It took some PHP magic and figuring out how Word Press handles widgets, but I managed to tweak a quote widget so it would show up in the theme I’d created. (I’m calling the stuff manually - which ends up being more flexible - and am avoiding using the widget functionality proper which I find a tad annoying)

Looks good, Clark. Nice banner image. And I so understand the advantages of a canned template for the solo blogger. A custom template will just tweak you to death.

Clark, I know it’s still a work in progress, but something to think about is that the site is wider than a monitor…

Looking forward to new content though.

The layout’s screwy for me in both FF and IE. Maybe my screen resolution isn’t wide enough?

Drupal is very customizable, which is good if you want that stuff. It’s also more of a CMS than it is a solo blog platform.

I’ll run it on a PC. I’ve been checking it with Safari and just assumed it was OK on the others.

I can see the whole screen but there’s a width gap between the posts and the sidebar that could be made smaller.

Regardless, I’m sure your new blog will be interesting.

Clark: I’m glad that you’re back! I notice that the moniker “Mormon” is replaced with “Pragmatic.” Does that mean that you’re not blogging about Mormon stuff and focusing on Pierce et al. regarding pragmatism? I miss all of the great side links.

Nice. In Firefox, you have a column that appears below the comment field.

I never use the widget functionality. If you want a basic theme that is easily customizable, I have a couple.

Things that I think you should add:

Comment numbering.
Bump up the content text size a bit.
I would consider moving the main content div away from the left side of the screen a bit.

Hey guys - sorry I didn’t get the css fixed over the weekend. I was going to work on it and my internet went down. I’m going to try and get my old style sheet more or less moved over and just doing a fairly thorough overhall of this one.

Blake, I’m going to try and get the sideblog put up - I’m just not sure how to do it yet.

Regarding comment numbering - I’ll look at the PHP and see how easy that is to add.

I’ll also hopefully have up a real post tomorrow. I don’t want to do that until I have the style sheets readable on Windows though.

Oh, regarding the change in name. I want to make it a bit broader. I’ll still have religious posts since I can categorize here easily.

12 Rich Knapton on January 12th, 2008 2:07 pm

Welcome back! Although I do miss the LDS reference. How about something like LDS Musings on (whatever).

Rich

I can tell you right now, that Internet Explorer hates this blog. The whole thing is shifted to the right, so that most of it’s off the screen.

I think it’s about time I made Firefox my main browser. IE7 does this to about a dozen Blogs I read. Microsoft needs help.

Hi Clark: I know there’s many competing demands on your time, but here’s hoping more blogging is in your future. Good luck with everything. - Steve Esser

I saw a comment you left about using YACC to recreate VBA.

I can only assume that you’re either a very, very clever troll, or someone who isn’t very cognizant of how the MS empire came to be.

I hate to say it, but a) Yes, YACC was around in the 90s and B) It’s a useless tool for almost everything. There’s no way MS could even attempt to reverse engineer their codebase - they don’t work from formal specs and the guys who cobbled that mess together are long gone. There is no practical way to get a meaningful spec from any MS file format.

Most people would rather write a grammar parser from scratch than mess about with YACC, Lex, Bison and all those tedious tool chains.

Most programmers who write compilers look on YACC with the same disdain that most mormons reserve for Caffeine Drinks.

Hey, sorry for not having time to finish things up. We’re painting our basement and as soon as that is done I promise the blog will get the attention it needs.

A few things.

1. Getting identical functionality to VBA with Yacc is unlikely simply because it is done with so many hacks. However you could get pretty close and then deal with special cases with Lex tweaks.

2. Saying Yacc is a useless tool is jaw dropping. Wow. There are some cases it doesn’t handle well and for really, really, really simple stuff a hand written tool can be better. But for nearly everything else Yacc is much faster and more maintainable.

I’m glad the quotes that were a part of the Mormon Metaphysics main page will also be found on your blog.

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