Category: meta

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.

Domain name update: I just received notification from GANDI.net that my domains have been successfully transferred from Register.com, Inc.

Yay! I was worried that it would fail before they expired on 7 January 2006, and that I would lose control. But my worst fears did not crystalize, and now my domains are in the loving care of the French.

I’m starting to move my best pictures over to Flickr. I’ll still have my photo gallery here (that will be all my pictures, even the bad out-of-focus ones), but the ones I like the most will be found here. I’ll add a link to the sidebar when I feel like it.

I like Flickr for its organizational tools, like tags and descriptions and the slideshow and all that.

Right now it’s mostly pictures of Smacky. I accidentally resized them to 800×600 (they were shot at 1600×1200) but what the hell, it’ll save on bandwidth.

Administrative note for the site (new posts below this one until noon on 3 January 2006):

My site (and email) may go down unexpectedly in the next couple of days. I’m in the process of transfering my domains from Register.com to a cheaper, and coincidentally non-US, registrar, GANDI.net.

Once it goes through I’ll be saving some money; Register charges US$35.00/yr per domain, and GANDI charges €12/yr per domain. Since I’m moving three domains, I’ll save over US$60.00, depending on the exchange rate.

Since my email is tied to the domain, if anyone has any urgent emails to send me, it would probably be best to use [the domain you’re at right now] at Gmail (dot com) for the next week. Thanks, although I have to say, I don’t expect much urgent email for the next week. Heh.

Happy New Year, y’all.

Update: After thinking about it, I realized that there probably shouldn’t be any problems, since DNS for my domains is handled separately from my registrar. I’m leaving this note up, though, just in case. I received emails from Register that the transfer will happen on 1/3/2006, so that’s the day anything that might go wrong… uh… might go wrong.

Uploaded some pictures I’ve taken over the past few weeks.

• Got some pictures of the moon from downtown Portland… including a couple of its reflection.
• Took a few pictures of the first snow of the season.

Smacky was wanting exactly none of this cold, wet, white stuff. He wanted back inside immediately. Of course, hydraulic pressure forced him outside later… when it was, y’know, colder.

Small update:

I updated my links page with a bunch of new cool stuff I’ve found on the intarweb. None of these are cutting-edge or new, but they’re new to me. A couple of highlights of great time-wasting sites:

• Boing Boing – geeky fun stuff listing
• 43 Things – collaborative site for to-do lists… basically. Or it started out that way. Go look. It’s fun.
• Flickr – a photo-hosting site that uses collaboration to organize an amazing amount of pictures from all over. I can spend an hour going through their photos organized by “interestingness”.

Edit: fixed the link to Boing Boing. My bad.