Dispatches from the Creation Wars

Welcome to my New Home

Posted by Ed Brayton on August 22, 2004
(19)
More »

If you’re reading this, you obviously got the message from my old blog and followed the link. This is the permanent home of Dispatches from the Culture Wars. A lot more content is planned for the main page, but that will take some time to get going the way I want to. As you can see, I pasted the last few entries from my old blog over here, just so we’d have some content here to test out the layout. A couple of notes on the new blog:

I strongly recommend that, if you have not already, you all go out and get a Typekey account. Typekey was set up specifically to work with blogs that are made with Movable Type. It will allow you to comment on any movable type blog with a single login, it protects your identity, and most of all, it helps me not to have to deal with comment spam. It’s also free and just takes a minute to set up. So please, follow that link, get your own typekey account and use it to log in when leaving comments here.

For those who don’t have a typekey account, I have this blog set up so that non-typekey members’ comments are moderated. That is, when you leave a comment for the first time, it will send me an email and ask me if I want to approve you to leave comments here. This, again, is to help prevent comment spam. The old blog was hammered with up to 50 comment spams a day, which I had to manually and laboriously delete one by one. I don’t want that to happen here. So again, a typekey account is the easiest way around this.

There will undoubtedly be a few hiccups along the way as I move everything over to here. Those of you who were linked from the old blog, rest easy. I just haven’t gotten all of the old links moved over here yet, but I will. I’m also going to reorganize a lot of them, since I’d dumped a lot of you under “interesting people” when I should have started 2 or 3 more categories instead. I’ll be doing that over the next couple days.

I have to say one huge, huge thanks to my friend Wesley Ellsberry, who patiently sat on the other side of the country on Friday night for about 3 hours and helped me solve problem after problem while installing the software on my new host. Without him, I would still be sitting here cursing at my computer and trying to figure out where the heck to install the database. It’s rare to find someone who truly is both a gentleman and a scholar, and even rarer to be priveleged enough to call them a friend. I cannot express my gratitude enough for all of his help.

Anyway, welcome to the new cyber-pad. Make yourself at home, have a glass of wine and keep your feet off the coffee table.

(19)
More »

Comments

  1. #1 Lynn
    August 22, 2004

    I don’t know if I have a TypeKey or not but it makes me happy to post your first comment honey. Your blog looks lovely.

  2. #2 Dan
    August 22, 2004

    Ed: Congrats on the move. The new site looks cool, and I look forward to your new content. By the way, I signed up for a TypeKey account and confirmed it. When I clicked on the “sign in” link in your comments section, I got an error message telling me you’d not signed up for that service. A minor glitch, I’m sure.

    As always, you can count on me as a regular visitor and sometimes commenter.

    Dan

  3. #3 Bill Ware
    August 22, 2004

    Nice job, Ed. I also got “The site you’re trying to comment on has not signed up for this feature. Please inform the site owner.” from our friends at TypeKey

    I hope your “Remember me” works now! Best regards, Bill

  4. #4 Ruidh
    August 22, 2004

    Nice digs.

    This is as good a time as any to thank you for all the crud you have to read in order to bring us the blog. I, for one, couldn’t take it.

    Ed reads the wacko fundamentalists so you don’t have to!

  5. #5 Ed Brayton
    August 22, 2004

    The comment thing is still being worked out, as you can tell. For some reason it says that I haven’t set up this site for typekey registration, but as far as I can tell I’ve done everything necessary. I’ve sent an email to them to resolve it. But the good news is that the “remember me” thing does work now, it will remember you. There are a couple other glitches to be worked out, like the bizarre fact that the paragraphs after a quote all appear double spaced for no apparent reason. But I’m sure it’ll all be worked out soon.

  6. #6 Seth
    August 22, 2004

    Nice digs! I hope you don’t mind a little constructive criticism.

    The XHTML validator doesn’t like you, particularly those troublesome <blockquote>’s. It appears the <p>’s before the quotes aren’t closed properly, and this is probably what’s causing the succeding paragraph to double space.

    I also have a rendering issue with your stylesheet. I use a high-res monitor with an appropriately larger font size. The height of the top banner is specified in pixels, and gets cut off in my browser. It might be better to either not specify the height, or to specify it in ex’s (the height of the current font’s lowercase x) rather that px’s.

  7. #7 Ed Brayton
    August 22, 2004

    Nice digs! I hope you don’t mind a little constructive criticism.

    Not at all, especially on stylesheet issues, which is not my strong suit.

    The XHTML validator doesn’t like you, particularly those troublesome blockquote’s. It appears the p’s before the quotes aren’t closed properly, and this is probably what’s causing the succeding paragraph to double space.

    Hmmm. Now if I only knew how to fix that. I just sent my stylesheet to a friend, hopefully he has a solution.

    I also have a rendering issue with your stylesheet. I use a high-res monitor with an appropriately larger font size. The height of the top banner is specified in pixels, and gets cut off in my browser. It might be better to either not specify the height, or to specify it in ex’s (the height of the current font’s lowercase x) rather that px’s.

    Cool, didn’t know that was possible, but I just made that change. Let me know if it looks better on your end.

  8. #8 Seth
    August 22, 2004

    The banner looks fine now.

  9. #9 Brent
    August 22, 2004

    Hi Ed – congrats on the new domain and the new site! I’ve updated my links to you.

  10. #10 Jason Kuznicki
    August 23, 2004

    Hello and welcome to your new site. It looks great! I’ll be updating my links shortly.

  11. #11 Flatlander100
    August 23, 2004

    Old site looked better. Color background was nice, and perfectly legible. This one is kind of barebones by comparison. Or are we still in beta here?

    Flat

  12. #12 Ed Brayton
    August 23, 2004

    Well leave it to you, flatlander, to be a stick in the mud conservative who prefers the older, hidebound, reactionary format to this new, more progressive layout. Always trying to keep the little guy down, just like The Man.

    Actually, I like the new color scheme a lot. I’ve still got some tweaking to do on the stylesheet, but this basic layout is going to stay this way.

  13. #13 carpundit
    August 23, 2004

    Ed,

    I just updated your link in my blogroll. I was worried you’d have a big drop in traffic when the three people who read my blog stopped clicking through to you.

    No worries, though. It works fine.

    Best of luck with the new home.

  14. #14 Bill Ware
    August 23, 2004

    I’ve seen these block quotes on other blogs and remember thinking, “I’m glad Ed doesn’t use these, they look so tacky.” With the reference already indented and in italics, the rectangle seems superfulous and gives the page a cluttered look.

    And what if there is a reference inside the reference?

    Do you end up with ever skinnier rectangles?

  15. #15 flatlander100
    August 23, 2004

    Ah, Ed… whoda thunk it? You of all people confusing mere change with progress. Strange times indeed….

  16. #16 PZ Myers
    August 25, 2004

    It looks OK, except…that background…it’s pink?!? It’s just a mildly irritating color. And it’s not even a very exciting shade of pink.

    Is it just to remind us all that content is what really matters?

  17. #17 Ed Brayton
    August 25, 2004

    PZ-

    It’s a very manly pink.

  18. #18 PZ Myers
    August 27, 2004

    Manly, no…but I will be charitable and regard it as a very liberal shade.