Despite a couple of hours catch up sleep this morning, I still feel like I’m running on fumes. Fortunately, my dinner plans this evening should not extend into the wee hours, so it looks like I’ll be able to get a decent night’s sleep – a real rarity when traveling on business.
In the meantime, I’ve got a ton of work to do – and I’d like to get out of here and enjoy Boston just a bit as well. Besides some project work and the usual assortment of administrivia, I’ve got a couple of issues:
Post Formatting:
Most of you are probably aware that I’m fond of lists, both bulleted and otherwise. Most of you are also probably aware that these lists invariably end up getting absolutely butchered in my feed, while they look marginally acceptable in a browser. In true user fashion, I’ve always blamed this on my software, but Alex ever so gently informed me yesterday that it’s actually a PEBKAC situation. The problem, it would seem, is that I do all my markup by hand, which leads to dropped tags here and there, and I almost never close my tags as I should. All of which leads to exceedingly ill-formed HTML.
Anyhow, this post is the first step towards a remediation of the problem, abandoning as it does a list structure where none is truly needed. I don’t think I’ll be able to go cold turkey, but I’ve at least accepted that I have a problem.
WordPress Themes:
For the vast majority of folks – those of you picking up my feed – this is a non-issue. But for the folks that visit the actual site, you’ll notice that the thing looks different on an almost daily basis. The reason for this is that I keep discovering minor problems with each theme, and my efforts to fix the problems seem to be manufacturing new ones. I’d more or less settled on Serene, a theme I’d admired from its TextPattern days, but after mucking around in the templates this weekend something went wrong and the comments portion of each entry got screwed up. So it was back to my other three column template, 3 K2 Redux Klein, which isn’t bad but has a number of issues of its own (Mint/Statcounter no longer work, the post slider doesn’t work, it breaks Alex’s Popularity Contest plugin, and so on). The “solution” for this is probably going to be to wait until Alex has some free cycles (not only don’t I have any bandwidth, but I’m so bad with CSS it takes me eons to do anything) and contract him to build me a Sandbox based three column template (and maybe ones for Cote and James – you guys interested?). Until then, I’m going to be desperately swapping from theme to theme in a shell game fashion to try and find the one that’s least broken.
Feedburner Headline Animator Broken:
Got a note from the very helpful Paul Cooper this morning saying that I was having problems with my main Feedburner feed. As it happens, that issue appears to be temporary because as near as I can determine everything’s fine on that end. Let me know if any of you have issues there, however.
The idea was completely plausible, however, b/c as Alex noted this weekend the headline animator for my feed on www.redmonk.com is broken, reading “Watch this space for future items!” A quick Google of that phrase and Feedburner leads you to a couple of threads that claims that the problem is caused by an underlying problem with the feed itself. But I suspect that’s not the problem in my case, not only b/c the feed seems to be working just fine in Google Reader, but because my feed validates as compliant Atom 1.0 according the Feed Validator. (Thx to Sam Ruby for the pointer to the WP Atom 1.0 plugin, incidentally). No idea, then, what the precise problem is: I’m hoping one of the Feedburner guys will run across this and give me a hint.
The Point?:
If you run into me this afternoon in Boston, and I look like an extra out of Dawn of the Dead, cut me some slack. I’m not after your brains, I promise. I have enough problems trying to use my own at the moment.
