Dolphin's Dock
Small Splashes
Slow Site
September 10th, 2008
I have no idea why things are running so slow here. It’s not my server (other things on the server pull up quickly), and I’ve disabled any WordPress plugins that could be causing the problem. I haven’t upgraded my WP installation in awhile so I’ll try that shortly, but that still wouldn’t explain why it’s all of a sudden slowed down. Stay tuned.
Update: As of last night, the site was still running incredibly slow. I changed nothing since then. This morning, the problem seems to have been resolved. Strange.
Question of the Day
April 17th, 2008
Are there simply a disproportionate number of pricks on the internet or is there something about the internet that instills prickishness into people?
Akismet
November 14th, 2007
Does anybody know if Akismet just automatically deletes comments that it’s absolutely positive are spam? I’ve noticed since I started this blog my captured spam count is alot higher than the comments I’ve been asked to verify. I check it daily so it’s not that it’s deleting things because they’ve been sitting in the filter too long. As of right now Akismet has capture 121 spam comments, yet I’ve only had probably 15-20 in the spam filter for me to verify. Anybody have experience with it?
Main Posts
Dolphin’s Dock At a Glance
I discovered Wordle, a tool which lets you paste in text to generate one of the “word clouds” that have been so popular everywhere. You know the jumble of text in which words that occur more frequently are displayed larger. Naturally I copy/pasted my entire blog into Wordle and this is what I came up with:
Going Naked
No, the page you are looking at isn’t some avant garde blog template. It’s what Dolphin’s Dock looks like stripped of its external style sheet in celebration of CSS Naked Day ‘08. (Note: I’ve only stripped down the front page so if you’re reading this as an individual post, click here to see the stripped down site.)
For the non-designers out there, some explanation. In the old days (ha!), websites used to largely hold all content and styling together in one HTML file. No more, thanks to a language called CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). CSS allows (among other things) designers to separate design from content, allowing the designer to easily change from one design to another without effecting content, and allowing non-designers to update content at will. As the popularity and usage of CSS has grown, some designers have forgotten (I’m guilty of it from time to time) that the point is to separate design and content, meaning that the content should still be easily available, appropriately organized, and clearly understandable without the style sheet prettying it up.
As the Naked Day website says, “It’s time to show off your <body>.
Dolphin’s Dock Makeover!
It’s a new year and so I thought it was perhaps time for a new look here at Dolphin’s Dock. While readers of Where the Dolphin’s Play know I rather often redesigned that blog, this is the first redesign of Dolphin’s Dock (aside from the seasonal Halloween theme). A few things have changed functionality wise. The site navigation (with my blogroll, recent comments and archives) has been move to the bottom of the page to give me more elbow room for the posts. To keep the front page neat and tidy (and prevent the new positioned site navigation from getting lost too far down there), I added an expand/collapse button to each post on the front page, it’s AJAX powered so you won’t have to wait for a new page to load. If you’re reading this on the front page, now would be a good time to test it out on this very post 
I’ve tested the site on FireFox, Safari, IE 6 & 7 with no problems. It should also display fine in browsers as old as IE5 though the AJAX won’t function so you’ll have to click through to view a post in it’s entirety. As always, let me know if you encounter any problem or have any feedback on the new look.
Say Cheese!
To my recent post on TheBoyfriend™’s birthday, frequent commenter (and excellent blogger) KipEsquire commented:
Any chance we might ever see a pic of you two?
I replied that my thought process on that was probably a post in and of itself, so here it is.
I haven’t put any pictures (other than pictures of the cats) mainly as a way of increasing the anonymity of this blog. On the other hand, I reveal enough information that anybody who knows me personally would probably be able to identify me with ease (and if not, they may well recognize the cats). I don’t really have a problem with that because I don’t have a problem with any of the people who would recognize the stories of my personal life reading this blog. But there are a few people I’d rather not have poking around here (at least not with the knowledge of this site’s author).
For one, my employer. Every last person I work with (though not everyone in the company) is a graduate of, or attended and dropped out of, a very conservative Christian college. They’re all nice people and I can’t say for certain that the revelation that they had a gay co-worker would end my career (and I kind of expect not), but my dealings with conservative Christians leads me to always be cautious because how they treat you when they assume you are “one of them” and how they treat those who are not can be starkly different. TheBoyfriend™ on the other hand is completely out among his co-workers (who are all awesome people), but among clients, not so much (I don’t k now what he’d say if one asked him outright, but I think it’s safe to say that it’s a bit unlikely that it’d ever just come up), and since he works with kids, I wouldn’t want some parent going all Anita Bryant on him.
So that’s why I haven’t put pictures up. But I go back and forth, and here’s why. I feel like I know (to some degree) some of my readers, especially those who have their own blogs or who have been with me since Where the Dolphins Play, and I want them to know me. A picture is worth 1000 words and all that jazz. Secondly, does a picture really damage anonymity that much? No one is anonymous on the web, so I’m already taking a “risk” as far as anonymity is concerned. How much does a picture increase that risk? Google has not yet come up with a way to search for photos (image search selects images based on a text query), so in the absence of names attached to the images, it would be impossible to search out the image intentionally. Barring and intentional search, my readership is far from huge (at Where the Dolphins Play’s peak, I was only getting around 200 unique visits a day, and I’m not near that many here), so I figure the chance of anyone who knows me or TheBoyfriend happening across this blog is negligible, and even less likely that that random visitor would be one of the very few who I don’t want to have reading. I thinking that the “risk” involved in posting a photo or two would probably be next to non-existent.
What about you out there with your own blogs? Do you post pictures? What went through your mind when you made the decision to do so? Your thought processes could help me with mine.
A Meme
Lee at Digital Nicotine tagged me for a meme. See it below.
1) Link to the person that tagged you, and post the rules on your blog.
2) Share 7 facts about yourself.
3) Tag 7 random people at the end of your post, and include links to their blogs.
4) Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
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1) I hate calling people. I don’t mind talking on the phone (though I’m not big into that either), but for some reason I get all panicky when I have to make a call. Even with people I know. Every weekend a conversation like this is heard in my house:
Me: What do you want to do tonight?
TheBoyfriend™: I don’t know why don’t you call So-and-So and see if they want to get together?
Me: Uhh, yeah, well… Let me check and see if they are on IM.
2) I have the most extreme “Hitchhiker’s Thumb” I’ve ever seen. I can extend my thumb backwards at the joint to a full 90° angle. I used to occasionally entertain myself as a child by slamming my hand down on the table in front of others, then squealing as though I’d broke my thumb prominently displaying my reverse-bent thumb as evidence.
3) My skin crawls when I hear someone mispronounce “coupon.” It’s “koo-pon” not “Q-pon.” It stems back to my freshman year in high school in which the English teacher had a list of words you were not allowed to mispronounce in her class. I think that I’ve since seen that both pronunciations are now considered acceptable, but I still cringe at “Q-pon.”
4) I know an insane amount of useless trivia. I know everybody says that but I’m well known for it among my friends. The funny thing is that it’s all stuck in my head and I can’t pull it forth on demand, only when something I hear reminds me of a strange fact. At that point I feel absolutely compelled to share it with the room.
5) I’m always the youngest in the room. Ok, so not always but I do tend to always have older friends. My senior year in high school sucked because nearly all my friends had graduated by the time, I started my senior year. Hasn’t changed. Almost all my friends are 2-10 years older than me.
6) I have no enamel on my teeth. As an infant I contracted spinal meningitis. I’m glad I don’t remember if because I’m told at it’s worst, blood began to seep from the pores in my hands. Anyways, the medication they gave me saved my life at the expense of causing my teeth to develop without enamel.
7) I like making desserts. I don’t like to cook “food-food,” but I will bake pies, cakes, cookies, etc. The strange thing is I don’t have much of a sweet tooth and so I really don’t particularly care to EAT my creations, just to make them. I’m always excited when I’m invited to a party or something and need to bring a dessert. I make a mean cheesecake and at our recent Halloween party I made up my own thing by baking sugar cookies, adding a dollop of vanilla pudding and sprinkling it was hand-picked raspberries. They were a BIG hit.
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Ok, I’m supposed to tag seven others, but honestly the only people I read regularly are the folks on my blogroll (just because of times sake, not because there aren’t plenty of other quality blogs out there), and two of them have already done it, I’m pretty sure two won’t, so I’ll just leave it open for anybody. If you do it as a result of seeing this post, leave a comment and I’ll link to you in this post.
Still Around
Sorry posting has been slow lately. It’s been an extraordinarily busy week at work. This is my desk right now:
Hint: When I’m actively using all four monitors (and I am), it means I’m uber busy. Usually, at least one is just sitting there for the geeky factor.