Updated Blog Theme, Using Twenty Eleven

Posted on 01/05/2012 by Harry

For a while I’ve been itching to use a new theme for this blog. That’s why starting today I’ve switched over to using one of the latest WordPress default themes ‘Twenty Eleven’. Some of the things that I love about this theme is its awesome readability, support of post types, and compatibility with all the plugins that I use.

I intend to slowly make edits and customizations to these theme so don’t be shocked to see things moved around one day. To be honest I was hoping to have more customizations ready to show off today but time wasn’t my friend.

It’s my expectation that this new theme will make reading my blog more enjoyable. There is now much more white space around the text, making the process of enjoying the words a little less cramped and a little more fun.

This theme also gets rid of the fixed menus on the left. I liked those guys at first but I’ve grown to find them very annoying.

Also something else that I’m excited about with this new theme is its support for Aside posts. An Aside post is an update that is usually a link to a trailer or a cool YouTube video: something which I want to share but doesn’t need a full-fledged post. I hope to take advantage of this short-form post and share even more fun links I find throughtout the day.

Till next time.

WordPress 3.3 ‘Sonny’ Released

Posted on 12/13/2011 by Harry

This blog has been updated to the latest version of WordPress, version 3.3 ‘Sonny’. This new version comes with an improved admin experience, enhanced uploader, and a lot more. Check out the blog announcement on WordPress.org and watch the video to see what is in this upgrade.

If you use WordPress I wholeheartedly encourage you to upgrade your installation. Not only do updates bring about great new features but they also always come with increased security, making your blogging experience safer and secure.

I haven’t delved too far into all the changes WordPress 3.3 offers but I know I’m already digging the new admin experience.

Go upgrade now and enjoy a new and improved WordPress.

New Theme, ‘Ari’

Posted on 09/06/2011 by Harry

If you can’t tell, I’ve changed the theme of my blog. The old one was beginning to grow old for me. I liked a lot of what it did, which is why I haven’t switched to a radically different layout, but I was yearning for something a little more fresh. (Also the font choices on the old theme were beginning to really grate on me. They didn’t make any sense and seemed to arbitrarily capitalize things with no reason arbitrarily. Just like that sentence.)

So this new theme’s name is Ari. I found it from this post about WordPress themes and downloaded it from the official WordPress theme repository (which always makes me feel safer).

It has three columns like the old theme with the left column staying fixed as you scroll.

For comparison’s sake here’s what the old theme looked like:

As you can see, not much different.

But as everyone likes to say, it’s the little things that matter! And matter they do!

Habits

Posted on 07/27/2011 by Harry

There’s a certain amount of comfort that comes from habit. It keeps things predictable, which in turn lets you worry less because you know what to expect. It’s much easier to go about your day with expectations than having to constantly relearn the behaviors around you.

There’s two primary sources of habit: internal and external. When young you learn a lot of habits from outside influences: don’t cross the street without looking both ways, say ‘bless you’ when someone sneezes. These come from your family and friends mostly, and serve as shortcut to societal customs.

The other source of habit comes from you. It is birthed, curated, and finally cemented by both conscious and unconscious internal mechanisms. These habits have the strongest influence on your behavior, dictating how you meet someone for the first time or how often you exercise.
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Sunday Updates

Posted on 06/12/2011 by Harry

I’ve taken this Sunday to refresh this blog. Some of the pages on the left hand side were growing quite out-dated. I’ve now gone through each page, removing those that were not being updated anymore and re-arranging the menu to be a little easier to use.

I’ve also added a new page to this blog, Good Reads. It’s a collection of my favorite posts, all in one easy to use location. Go over to the page and have a look. Even give some of the posts a read. I’m pretty sure you’ll enjoy at least one of them.

Also I’ve ported over my other domain hswolff.com to being managed by posterous. I’m going to use that page as a way to post small and quick style posts. It should prove to be updated on a daily basis so be sure to check it out regularly.

How I Make My Week of Links

Posted on 10/25/2010 by Harry

The first few times I was formatting my ‘Week of Links’ post I had a very loose and chaotic system in place. Most of my reading is done through my Google Reader account, which helps centralize all the different websites and blog feeds into one place. This way, instead of having to load 10+ websites every day to catch up on news, I am able to go to my Google Reader and read all my news in one neat location.

When I first started saving links to use for these posts I would shift between tagging them, starring them, or sending them to my Instapaper account. This quickly became chaos and resulted in more confusion and work than I had ever intended.

Slowly, as the weeks progressed, I fell into a rhythm. During the week I would Star each Google Reader item that I thought was interesting or worthwhile to share. After the week was over I would go through my starred items from the past week, sometimes skipping articles that were no longer relevant or interesting, and open each article in a new tab (in the background thanks to this Google Chrome Extension). At this point I have one Google Chrome windows open with about 15-20 tabs, each with the article loaded.

From here I open the most excellent Chrome Extension Session Buddy and use its export feature of my open tabs to produce a CSV file with the title and URL of each article.

Until this week I would manually go through this list and create the HTML necessary to make each headline linkable, which was quite an arduous and boring job. This week however I made a breakthrough and was able to automate this task through the use of only FOUR lines of Python code. Opening a Terminal window on my Mac I entered into the Python Interpretator and ran the following four lines:

import csv
reader = csv.reader(open("googlRss.csv", "rb"))
for row in reader:
	print '<a href="%s" target="_blank">%s</a>' % (row[1], row[0])

Which produced the following result:

After this point it was only a matter of adding my comments to each headline, and voila! The Week of Links was ready for publishing!

General Site Update

Posted on 08/23/2010 by Harry

Hello everybody. Three things I’d like to make note of today:

1) Long overdue for an update, my About page has now been revised with more current and relevant information. With the new edit I hope I – the person – will be more understandable from the position of a stranger, and more accessible. I figure it never hurts to have more friends, so why not present myself in a friendly and approachable manner? I am particularly partial to the Care Bear picture I took at the end of the page. Let me know your thoughts in this post.

2) I’ve rearranged the display of my content somewhat. I’ve moved the links to my archived posts to the bottom of the page, added a neat calendar widget, and changed up the top navigation bar to post topics that I update more frequently.

3) I’ve added a small Google AdSense block on the right side of my blog for two reasons: 1) I would not mind making money off my blog and writings and 2) I want to gain experience and understanding of how Google AdSense works.

Aside from that I hope you enjoy reading my words. They take me some time to write, but hopefully you’ll enjoy reading them for a lot longer.

P.S.: That door knob picture is by me. Hope you like it .

The End of My Official Week of Music – OWoM

Posted on 06/25/2010 by Harry

My Official Week of Music (OWoM TM not pending) has officially drawn to a close. From Monday till Friday I’ve posted almost exclusively about music, with posts about music videos, songs, and three full-length album reviews. To say its been exhausting would be accurate, however an exhaustion that I have fully enjoyed.

I rather enjoyed this arbitrary assignment I enforced on myself. It gave me direction and purpose, allowing me to not worry about what I would write about and just focus on the music – not that I don’t usually do that anyways. However, by knowing that I would need to write a review I listened to the albums much more critically. I left the role of passive listener and stepped into the role of critic with much more frequency.

It was an interesting shift in approach, one that I tend to only perform after listening to an album frequently. Rather, I was approaching these albums – on my first listen-through – with an already critical ear which emphasized different parts of the music that normally I would have ignored. And that’s the reason I generally first approach music passively: I fear I will not enjoy it as much as I could. I fear a type of ‘critic’s curse’ that prevents enjoyment of artwork when approached critically. However by listening to the albums critically I felt myself delve into its sound-scape with greater ease and pace, giving me many more thoughts that I was then able to share with you.

The only downside of this method is the amount of attention and energy it consumes. A leisure activity becomes laborious, sapping one’s energy and tiring them out. The result is welcome, however the time spent consuming the music didn’t allow for its enjoyment. And really that’s why I listen to music: to enjoy it. I’m ready to become a passive listener again; it’s going to be a real joy.

Announcing inipsa llc

Posted on 05/25/2010 by Harry

I’ve been playing around with web design and development since I was thirteen years old. That was when I picked up a copy of HTML & CSS For Dummies. It was also the time of Geocities and HTML3.01. So many things have changed since then and I’ve done my best to change with them.

That is why I feel that now is a great time to begin offering my skills and services to everyone. There’s only so many hours in a day that I can spend learning obscure CSS tricks and neat HTML work-arounds.

So, allow me to introduce my web design, web development, general new media service company to you: inipsa.

It is a word that I made up, one that I hope can find its own meaning as it matures. So please click over to inipsa’s website (which I designed) and see if I can help you. Let’s make something!

Harry Wolff

Personal blog of Harry Wolff. Web creative with passion for novelty.

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