Category: meta

Oops, my smaller domains, lunarobverse.com, liefactory.com, and runmoonrun.com are all offline at the moment. Working on it. Sorry.

My political-oriented blog, Lie Factory, is back online. Enjoy!

Sorry things have been so quiet around here (also here and to a lesser extent here).

Believe me, I have no end of things I could comment on, or write about. I’m marinating in snark and need to get it all out. However…

I’ve been deep in designing my new look. I’m really excited about it and can’t wait to show you all. It fits all the criteria I wanted – clean, modern, valid HTML, XHTML and CSS. It’s also an obvious evolution from what I’ve been using.

I’m posting this on Saturday morning – I should be switching over to the new site by Sunday evening. Just a few more kinks to work out, especially on the comments, and I’ll be done.

I also want to add an “about me” section, and reformat my blogroll and links. I’ll need to go back and fix any broken links in my almost 1000 posts, and make the picture gallery match the look of the rest of the site. I’ll do all that after the rollout, though.

I’ve learned a lot, and have to give reluctant thanks to John Gruber of Daring Fireball for forcing me to dig in and code my stuff myself, as well as extra thanks to Caleb Phillips of small white cube, my webhost, for help and patience. And no thanks to my mortal enemy for borking the connection to the server at odd times and hours, usually when I’m expecting an important email or, y’know, working on my site. Fuckers.

Update on site re-design:

I’m this -> <- close to being ready to roll it out!

I just need to:

• design a logo,
• tweak the colors a bit,
• figure out what’s going in the sidebar,
• get the comments section working,
• go back through the archives and fix broken links,
• get all the little “goodies” like the drop-down menus working,
• and update the picture gallery css,

…and I’ll be done.

I think y’all will be pleased with the result. Very pleasing, simple design, easy to read and dial-up friendly.

It should even be mobile-device friendly for those of you reading my blob on Blackberries or cell phones or PDAs. Y’know… management-types.

On the other hand, for the millions of my readers who depend on instant updates of all content on this site* via RSS or Atom feeds, I believe I have fixed my broken Atom feed for now.**

You should see the link over in the right sidebar, or if you’re using a modern browser (sorry IE users) you’ll see the tell-tale orange feed link in its appropriate place.

* And by “millions” I mean probably none of you.

** And by “for now” I mean until I update the site and forget to fix the broken site feed again.

Site update:

I’ve worked on the re-design all weekend and, well, it’s not done. I’m very close, and I think I’ve got all the major components in the right arrangement to each other, but there remains much tweaking of sizes and margins and all that, and I still need to add in the optional components I’d planned for.

Plus I still need to design a new logo. That’s the hardest part. Despite my love of Mac OS, I’m not really a graphics kind of guy. Can’t have a new design without a new logo.

It’s fun, and I’m learning a lot about CSS and XHTML and how Blogger works. But just give me a little more time, maybe this coming week, before I unleash Lunar Obverse 2.0 on y’all.

Why do projects, which seem so simple at first, always seem to snowball into larger and larger projects?

So, as mentioned, I’m elbows-deep into redesigning this site. Basically from the ground up. It’s fun, being all design-y and stuff. I’m digging it.

But I’ve realized that I’m going to have to go back over my previous posts on this blog and add the appropriate CSS tags to make the styles all work correctly. I wish I was better at using grep or awk – would make it so much easier.

But then, I also had a realization about domain names and blog names (those are two different things to me – I’ve caused confusion in others by mixing-and-matching). For instance, here are the domains I own:

• bamoon.com (you are here)
• brian-moon.com (currently the dev site for LO 2.0)
• lunarobverse.com (not currently being used)
• liefactory.com (my political blog)
• runmoonrun.com (my running blog)

And here’s the thing. The Lie Factory blog is on liefactory.com. Run, Moon, Run! is on runmoonrun.com.

But Lunar Obverse, this blog you’re reading now, isn’t on lunarobverse.com. I got to thinkin’ it should be.

But Lunar Obverse, the blog, is my personal blog. However, Lunar Obverse Consulting is my DBA and business name.

The reason I’ve been holding off putting something up at lunarobverse.com is because I meant for that to be my professional site. Now I’m thinking that maybe I should move this personal blog that you’re reading now to lunarobverse.com, and make bamoon.com or brian-moon.com my professional site.

Decisions, decisions. The more I thought about it (and was gently prodded about it by my friends) I realized that, if I was really super-cool, I could make one page the jumping-off point, and aggregate all the new content in one place for your reading pleasure. That would probably be kinda easy to do, although I don’t know how much strain that would put on dante. I’ve been making a lot of requests of Caleb lately and he’s been very supportive but I don’t want to push it…

For now I’m just going to finish the re-design. Then update the back posts, fix broken image tags and links. Finally I’ll figure out what to do with all the domains I now own. It’s an ownership society, they tell me, so I guess I’m doing pretty well in virtual estate.

As a side note, this will mark my 933rd post on Lunar Obverse. I might have a celebration or contest or something for my 1000th post. I’ve got a lot of garbage swag I could give away… Just an idea. Maybe it’ll boost my readership!

Update on the internets shenanigans and goings-on.

First, my site redesign. I’ve been wanting to do a site redesign for a while. I even teased about it a while ago, but I can’t find the post, so no linkie. Just know that it’s been on my back-burner for a long time.

I really like the moon background picture, and the three-column look, but it’s not standards-compliant and it really sucks for folks on dial-up. Yes, there are still people who have dial-up internets. I know, I know, you thought it was an urban legend like Budwiser not selling beer to Arabs or Bill Gates sending you $5, but it’s true.

I also wanted to somewhat simplify the overall graphic design. I’m pretty sure I’ll just have two columns, for instance. I’ll still have a moon theme but it will be subtler – moon bullets on my posts, for example, and a moon banner picture across the top.

Here are a couple of sites that I like and that are inspiring me:

• Daring Fireball
• Kottke
• Furious Nads!
• group hug (text content might not be work-safe)

There might be more but those are the ones I can think of (and link to) off the top of my head.

Second, my political posts will be on a separate domain and a separate blog. After going to Powell’s last weekend to see Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and Jerome Armstrong talk about their new book, Crashing The Gate (about which event I have a post I need to finish up), I thought I’d work on blogging local and national politics a bit more extensively – and I had a domain I registered a year ago and hadn’t been using that would comment on my cynical view of politics.

Say “hello” to The Lie Factory.

Likewise, I’m moving my running-related posts to a brand-new domain and separate blog. For now anything to do with training or racing will be there. Right now I only have one post, since I just bought the domain this morning (from GANDI, a French company that only charges 12 Euros per year. I forget the exchange rate but it’s cheap, believe me).

Introducing Run, Moon, Run!.

Once the site re-design is done here, I’ll add some bells and whistles to TLF and RMR. For right now I’m just using some default Blogger templates.

Sorry for the lack of posts ’round here. I’ve got (yet another) a new project I’m working on, and a couple of posts in draft form that I’ll try to toss up here when they’re good and ready and not one minute before.

In the meantime, let me just say “ow.”

Man, is it just me, or is this place looking a little… tired lately?

Someone should do something about that.