One has created version 4.0 of the not-so-venerable “Greywater” WordPress theme. New layout, new feeds from external sites, FF Meta, more hubris, white background, search is back… and I even removed the border on the header image (thanks Lyds)!

Need to figure out what to do about images in the new default column width. For CSS nerds the layout is my own, largely untested version of “liquid-elastic”—it shrinks or expands to fill the screen up (or down) to a point. Works okay on Safari (Mac, iPhone), Firefox and Camino. No idea yet how it looks on PCs. I will go ahead and assume that it’s pretty much a disaster on Internet Explorer right now. Plenty to fix and fuss with, ad nauseam, over the coming weeks…

Oh, and um… happy new year!

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• Going all the way with Georgia
• Grids
• Make your own!

Version change time! I’m pretentiously calling this theme “Greywater 3.7,” but even more pretentiously “codenaming” it “Make Your Own!” For some reason this kind of buffoonery never gets old.

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• Helvetica!
• Orange!
• New!

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• Going all the way with Georgia
• Make your own!
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Technicalities

For anyone interested in the nerd story, here are some notes.

• When I first registered zero2180.net back in 2005 I wanted something fairly short, but I was never happy with it because the meaning was unclear and it was hard to verbalise (“z, e, r, o—the letter, 2, 1, 8, 0—the number” ugh… just delightful to have to say all this over the phone, way to go Mr. Usability).
• I also had all kinds of parts to the site back then—the portfolio was called “Pixel Rebellion,” (zero2180.net/pixelrebellion) the photos were called “Longitudes,” (zero2180.net/longitudes) the blog was “Dead Reckoning” (zero2180.net/deadreckoning) and the URLs, well: http://www.zero2180.net/deadreckoning/2007/03/02/they-came-from-the-north/. I changed most of this a while back, and the new domain fixes the last problem.
• Late last year, when I registered ztoe.net, I stopped being a tightwad for five seconds, did it right and went with a good registrar.
• When I set up the new domain on my shared hosting account I created a new location for it on the server, and used Subversion to install the latest version of WordPress (2.8), which takes, like, two seconds, seriously.
• The tricky part was updating the site URL in my database. The afore-linked instructions are great, based as they are on the original (and best) Podz guide. I wound up having to find and replace the URL in more places than are specifically mentioned here, but the section on “changing the URL directly in the database” was the place to start, of course only after making copious backups.
• I had some problems with wp-cache at first that had me stumped for a while (the server kept spewing encoding errors). Deleting and reinstalling the plugin from within WordPress did the trick nicely.
• Since then I’ve been spending most of my time fixing images in posts, because I originally had them in a separate assets folder back in the days of WordPress 1.5, but then the media gallery came along, etc. One nice (newish?) feature is that if you have enabled the option to place uploads in time-based folders and you add an image to an old post, it creates folders for the resource based on the post’s publication date rather than the current date.

I’m still working on fixing all of the images, but if you notice any 404s or other glitches that don’t seem right, please let me know.

Update: see the Changes page for additional information.

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• 32 people were asked for their top three news sources
• 95 total news sources were indicated
• 51 of them are web (all free, as far as I know)
• 17 are tv
• 16 are radio
• 5 are conversation-based, and
• 9 are print, of which:
  • three are free (YDN, Middletown Press, UK Metro)
  • six cost money (Les Echos, “various magazines,” Courier Mail, Hartford Courant, Boston Globe and New Yorker)

Of the six paid news sources, three of them are someone’s primary source (Les Echos, various mags, and the Courant). One of those is a French newspaper, and another the available magazines in my friend’s break room. This means that one of my friends (out of 31 who responded) pays for their primary source of news, and only five people out of 32 pay for any of their top three news sources, none of which have a revenue stream that is Internet-based.

What does this mean? Among my friends news is important, but paying for it directly—in the sense of buying bread and milk—is not. (Of course, people in the group I asked might be paying for something, such as a monthly cable bill or donations to a radio station.) The dominant medium for news is the Internet and its ascendent form is the web, as opposed to e-mail, newsgroups or RSS. And people tend to get their news from a variety of media. The variety aspect is probably not new, and I suspect newspapers would have dominated in a poll like this twenty years ago the way that the web does now. But these days my friends aren’t spending much time turning pages.

One of my friends works for a newspaper and seems to think his current job is not long for this world. It’s hard to watch what is happening to newspapers as they decline, and much harder still to be a part of it. This is all anecdotal, but some things are now obvious: technological change has rendered the businesses built on the previous system obsolete. Clay Shirky’s magnificent essay has become the canonical statement.

Good luck with the micropayments, Rupert.

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The problem here is the myth of regular readership. When I started newspaper sites, I had publishers on my rear because they expected people to read them every day, just as (they thought) people read newspapers. But just because the thing plops on the front porch every day, that doesn’t mean everybody reads everything—or sees every ad. That was the myth that fueled overpriced ad rates and overinflated editorial egos. Online, we get to see what people really read – and what it’s really worth to them—and that’s a lot less than we ever thought.

Dr. Evil is purported to have said, in relation to all this, that “the current days of the Internet will soon be over.”

I mean, Mr. Murdoch.

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Usually when letting people know something is different (defines structure, points somewhere else, whatev) one parameter does the trick, sometimes you need two, but four in my humble etc., is not only seriously contradicting the stated goal of minimalism as an aid to clarity, its repetitiveness is hugely unnecessary, grumble Philip Glass grumble…

Got Georgia. Here are some screenshots from before, during and after.

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• And now… modern!
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