Patience

Attempting to solve one problem with the WordPress theme has only succeeded in raising several others. For now commenting is possible but your comments will be rendered invisible for reasons I’ve yet to resolve. Your indulgence is requested. Thanks.

Update: So the moral of that episode was don’t try and fix anything that isn’t (too) broken. The problem—the front page occasionally needs reloading to render properly—was solved by upgrading to the latest version of the theme. (K2 is updated regularly.) Unfortunately this raised considerable, and far worse, problems involving the inability to post comments using either Safari or Opera. Firefox was okay but considering that 14% of visitors here are Safari users (not least myself!) that was an unnacceptable state of affairs. So I’ve returned to the older version and will update when they have something available that isn’t a flaky point release.

One final thing: I’ve disabled the comment spam catcher plugin as this was causing problems for some people when posting comments. The built-in WordPress spam filter is now running in the background which should make things more user friendly.

Update 2: Page loading delay was possibly caused by a faulty plugin which I’ve now disabled. We’ll see.

Happy birthday { feuilleton }

one.jpg

It was a year ago today that I sat down and wrote some words of Charles Fort’s, “One measures a circle beginning anywhere…”, as a headline for the first entry on this page. Some posts over the ensuing year have been more popular than others (and it should be pointed out that the “most popular” list in the sidebar has only registered hits since a new plugin was activated). Referral links and Del.icio.us adds are a good guide to popularity so here’s the top five:

Watchmen (June 24th). An old Fantasy Advertiser interview with Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons about their graphic novel masterwork. I knew this would be popular, not least because it’s one of the best interviews I’ve read about Watchmen, and one conducted quite soon after the story had been completed. Good to be reminded that the book’s creation owed as much to the artist as it did to the writer. As Alan Moore’s popularity has grown there’s been a tendency on the part of critics to see him as the sole author of his comics, all of which are collaborations with different artists who invariably contribute to the work themselves. From Hell artist Eddie Campbell has recently been showing examples of these working methods on his excellent weblog, The Fate of the Artist.

Atomix by Nike Savvas (August 5th). A big surprise this. I spotted pictures of this installation in passing on a Yahoo! news page, thought it looked interesting so made a little entry about it. Many hits later people are still searching for pictures. Ms Savvas would be advised to tour this artwork, people love it.

Aldous Huxley on Piranesi’s Prisons (August 25th). Another scanned article and another surprise. I remember thinking ?no one will want to read a long-dead writer talking about a long-dead engraver.? The moral, then, is never underestimate your audience.

The boys (various dates). Despite the groaning tubes of the interweb being stuffed with every shade and variety of porn, some pictures of unclothed young men remain more popular than others. So people arrive here searching for Eugen Bauder (very popular indeed), Felipe Von Borstel, Brian Joubert and others. I often feel as though I should apologise for not having any exclusive material but surfers of the one-handed variety are probably only stopping by for a moment before flitting elsewhere.

Barney Bubbles: artist and designer (January 20th). Very gratifying that this has been received with enthusiasm as this is the kind of post I like best, something that makes up for gaps in the pool of web data. These entries take time to prepare so it’s good to know that people appreciate the effort; I’m hoping there’ll be more to come (work allowing) in 2007.

Thanks for reading!

John x

To 3 or not to 3

Things are in a state of flux here while I upgrade the WordPress software. Updating to the latest version went fine, it’s been running for the past couple of days, but upgrading the theme is proving less than satisfactory since I’d been using an old version of the K2 theme that I’d hand-modified.

I’ve also been thinking about switching to a three-column arrangement, as Geoff did recently at Bldg Blog, although the three-column version of K2 still needs updating. It also seems to occupy more screen width than other three-column solutions which isn’t good for people with small monitors. Hmm…. If you notice any bizarre changes or alarming errors over the next day or so, this is the reason why.

In praise of WordPress

Regular readers may have noticed the coming and going of certain features here recently, due to my experimenting with different plugins. One of the great features of the WordPress blogging software is its open source quality which allows anyone to write a plugin to extend the application. Ones I’ve been playing with over the past week are Justin Watt’s Random Image plugin which is creating the “Previously” “From the archives” images in the sidebar and the Social Bookmarks plugin which adds a “Bookmark this” feature to the end of posts. The latter I’ve disabled for now since it refuses to allow me to choose which bookmark selections are shown (del.icio.us and digg, for example), presenting instead a fruit salad of different gifs that looks messy. I may return this later if I can find a way to get it to work properly—PHP is not my forte—or find another plugin that does the required job.