Welcome to 0xDECAFBAD v4, my fourth attempt at establishing and maintaining a presence on the web.
I am your host, variously known as:
deusx- l.m.orchard
- Leslie Michael Orchard
This is all personal branding and googlejuice; my friends call me “Les”.
I am a hacker, tinkerer, and creative technologist working in Santa Clara, CA (USA). I live with two spotted Ocicats, two dwarf bunnies, and a very patient and understanding wife. On rare occasions when spare time comes in copious amounts, I play around with odd bits of code and writing here.
What’s under the hood?
This site largely runs on WordPress now, with a small handful of tweaks and hacks I couldn’t resist tossing in. I haven’t yet done any proper release of my modifications here, but I may someday and certainly am not averse to sharing when asked.
@@ Watch this space as I rebuild this site with things it used to have. (ie. a wiki, projects, links, etc)
Got any plugins?
In no particular order, here’s an overview of the plugins I use around here:
Optimal Title — I like making my page titles read from specific to general, so this helps me lead with the post title and trail with the blog title.
dp.SyntaxHighlighter — Beats all those clumsy attempts I’ve made using <pre> tags and textareas.
PHP Markdown — I got hooked on Markdown while using Blosxom and Movable Type. There’s no turning back now.
AJAX Comment Preview — By semi-popular demand, I offer AJAX-enabled comment preview. It seems pretty nifty to have.
Related Posts — I think that attempting to show some relation between posts provides a better way to wander around in archives than by dates.
Ultimate Tag Warrior — It’s an ultimate warrior for tagging. I dislike the usual category technology, am hooked on del.icio.us tagging, so here we are.
WordPress Administration Design: Tiger — Because WordPress’ default admin style kinda looks like butt.
History
2002: It looked like this. I launched this site on a lark, liking the name oxDECAFBAD. It’s a 32-bit hexadecimal number, as well as an expression of distaste for things not containing caffeine. Initially, the software was Movable Type, which I quickly overwhelmed with hacks and plugins and all manner of crap.
2003: It looked like this. Tired of the crud I’d accumulated with my Movable Type exploits, I rebooted things and reworked everything to use Blosxom. I also started taking a turn away from blogging “proper” and mostly posted lists of links for awhile.
2004: It looked like this. I stole some ideas from Mark Pilgrim’s accessibility series (whether it showed or not), and planned to switch to a more verbose and article-oriented style of blogging. I also tried to integrate my wiki and link-blogging activities into a more unified navigation on the site. Unfortunately, the net result was that the only thing that really every got updated was my linkblog.
2005: Wanting to switch back to a more free and lightweight style of blogging, I ditched Movable Type and my article-length-biased templates. (For some reason, I always end up making MT move like a battleship.) This is another reboot, and as such, many of my site’s previous features (ie. the wiki and linkblog) have gone away until I’ve had a chance to reevaluate them.
@@ More soon.
2 Trackbacks/Pingbacks
[...] One thing that’s bugging me a little is the disconnect between the categories I’ve got and the tagosphere (del.icio.us, Technorati etc). The shared ontology bit. I want to retain my own taxonomy (more or less), but still have my posts easily accessible from the external tag tools. Sometime about a month ago I saw (and I think blogged, but can’t find) a tool for mapping personal tags to other peoples, but that seemed a lot of manual effort. If I’d actually got around to the machine learning blog post similarity stuff I’ve been intending to put together for years then I’d have a big part of the solution (external services like Google or Yahoo! keyword thingy might be quickest). Using SKOS for mapping would also be a big part. But then there’s still the need to generate the appropriate pings. I dunno, maybe one or two of the WordPress plugins Les refers to might do the trick in the near term. Or maybe I just need a quick-hack script using a simple keyword map. It’d be interesting to see if 3,000 or so backdated pings (sent over an hour or two) created any ripples. Danny@12:56 | General & Site & Blogging [...]
[...] Some of these were newly added, and after some rummaging arouund other Word Press blogs, like the totally geeky cool named 0xDECAFBAD who truly has a colophon. It was there I saw the Steve Smith’s Tiger Style Administration plugin, which reformats that old blue WordPress admin display to something more modern, as described by the author After working with WordPress for several months now, I felt the Administration area needed a little “freshening up”. I wanted the utility to feel more like an application, and less like a traditional website. [...]
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