Dolphin’s Dock

While I’m still not totally sold on the idea, I’m finally giving in and trying twitter. Click the bird up at the op to follow me on Twitter.

I realize I’ve not been posting much lately (alot going on) so maybe the spambots have decided my blog is dead and therefore they have less change of being akismeted and summarily deleted, but I’ve been getting an INSANE amount of spam here recently. Fortunately, Akismet is catching them, but I swear since June has started I must have had to delete a couple hundred spam messages. What’s up with that?

Well, you may have noticed that things looks a little different here now. I’ve been so busy lately that I have only had time to occasionally pick at it here and there, so it’s taken me a LONG time to get this theme developed. I dove a little deeper into WordPress’s templating core in this one giving it full support for threaded comments (a feature added in WordPress 2.7, I believe), and the ability to easily switch out the header image (which I probably won’t really do, but I wanted to teach myself HOW to develop a theme with that capability). So I’m pretty proud of this one.

I made the conscious decision when I started this theme to NOT worry about Internet Explorer 6 compatibility. IE6 is a crap browser and now that it’s two versions old, it’s time for people to upgrade. I haven’t tested the template in IE6, but I know it will look pretty messy because, if nothing else I used a fair number of transparent PNGs which IE6 doesn’t natively support. If you have to use IE6 for some reason, there’s always the RSS feed. But outside of IE6, I’ve tested it in IE 7 & 8, and the latest versions of Firefox and Safari. If you run into any bugs that I’ve missed let me know.

Of course, also let me know what you think about the theme in general!

Wow, it’s been a full month since I’ve posted anything! Interestingly, my absence hasn’t seemed to affect my hit counter (which may say something about the hits I’m getting…). In case anybody was worried, nothing is wrong, just staying very busy (with mostly good things) and blogging has fallen to a lower priority than other things in my offline life. A quick run down:

I’m all packed and headed to my parents’ tomorrow morning for the holidays. I doubt I’ll be making a post between now and when I get back (Sat or Sun). Have a great holiday!

(12/18/2008) Update:Within 24 hours of starting the cranberry and apple cider vinegar regimen, Sigyn was able to release an increased volume, if not yet normal, of urine. 3 days later, she’s going normally, behaving normally, and as far as I can tell is completely cured. She’ll stay on that diet for the rest of the week to be safe, but I highly recommend anyone with a cat with a UTI (caught early enough), to try ACV and Cranberry extract before rushing to the vet’s for antibiotics.

If you’re particularly squeamish, you may want to skip this post.

Friday evening, I noticed that Sigyn was almost ALWAYS in the litter box whenever I looked the room. Saturday morning, I noticed that she was in there (every 2-5 minutes), and squatting, but not more than a drop was coming out, and she occasionally was trying to use the bathtub on occasional as well without any better results). I’m no vet, but I know enough about cat health to know that those symptoms mean only one thing, she’s got a UTI (urinary tract infection). Christmas has put a strain on the bank account however so we’re hoping to avoid a vet visit if at all possible (and of course no vets were open til today anyhow and taking her to the animal hospital was out of the question unless it was clearly an emergency). Still a UTI isn’t something you ignore in cats because if you let it go too long and the bacteria get up into the kidneys, it can turn fatal in a hurry.

Been getting some peculiar spam from from IP 94.102.60.151 the last few days. Akismet is catching it now after I marked the first two I received as spam. But the the thing i don’t get is this. The comment contains no links, just random characters like “2045hjsdfjefn45f,” there’s no url entered to be linked to from the commentor’s name, and even the email address seems to be nonsense. What possible benefit could they be getting by posting spam that in no way sends ANY traffic their way? I don’t get it.

Unless you’re reading through a feed reader, you already know that the brand new Halloween theme for 2008 is up here at Dolphin’s Dock. I wanted badly to do something fairly different than the standard “blog” layout (you know a column of content with a sidebar or two), but I found the reason that layout is so standard is because the traditional blog has content that fits that layout fairly nicely and it’s surprisingly hard to rearrange it in any meaningful way while maintaining the usability of the site. Hopefully I got close here.

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.

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: