Asides

New books purchased today: J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (to read with Evan), John Szarkowski's The Photographer's Eye, and Frank Warren's compilation Post Secret. Looking forward to reading every page of each book.

still struggling to find a way to properly represent a complex hierarchical taxonomy along with paired year data in Drupal, to do something like allowing a contributor to specify that someone received a UBC: Bachelor's Degree: Bachelor's of Science: Zoology in 1998 - in such a way that I could use the UBC, Bachelor's, BSc, and Zoology levels of the hierarchy, as well as the year. It's not just a simple Taxonomy vocabulary because the year pairing throws it off... It's not just a simple CCK field, because it needs to be more flexible...

AsideShop should be able to provide some almost-Drupal functionality in WordPress. Without the content types stored in the database, and just at the presentation layer, but still this could be very cool for building websites where you want to display different bits of content in different ways. Could have different templates for podcasts, videos, presentations, blog entries, etc... Interesting...

but, can asides be posted without having to enter anything the Title field? asides aren't big enough to need titles... Update: YES! No title necessary! It'll use the post ID in the slug, and looks like it works just fine. Rock.

I was missing riding my bike - having parked it for 2 days following the second freak spring blizzard of 2008 - so decided to ride this morning anyway. Fun, in parts. Not so much, in others. Slush froze into clumps of sharp, crunchy ice, making some of the road sections difficult. The paths were all fine, but some of the side streets were downright scary. Not sure if I'll be riding tomorrow or not...

yeah. the flames choked. again. defense was stuck in third gear. offense was shaky. we got outplayed. again. "blue collar work ethic" only goes so far - you have to show up, too.

I'm playing with a WordPress plugin called AsideShop - it lets you define a category to be handled as "asides" and provides a way to override the post display template so you can make them look however you want. The cool thing is - you can define post templates for each category on your site, if that kind of thing floats your boat. Very cool. But, I do need to figure out how to exclude items in the Asides category from the main site feed...

Looks like I can write asides, which could live somewhere between Twitter tweets and full-on blog posts. Should be able to also have just an asides page and feed, too... Might have to think about the presentation of asides, and see if I can yank them from the main feed as well...

really? asides? I wonder what those are...

I've hopefully finished shuffling around the bits that run this blog. Sorry for the extra noise in the RSS feed. This will hopefully be the last move for D'Arcy Norman dot net for some time. It's now living on a Dreamhost server, and DNS should be propagating over the weekend.