Control Option Command

I’ve been meaning to release the theme of this blog for ages, yet I never really got around to finishing it.
After a bit of consideration I’ve decided to go for the easy option and just release it “as is”. It’s based on Sandbox and is therefore GPL-licensed. Otherwise I’d release it under my personal “I don’t give a hoot, but please credit me”-license.

If you want to use this theme for your blog without making any changes, here’s what you might be interested to know:

• The text in the top banner is entirely configurable in the theme options. You can even choose between using Flash, a static image file (there’s a template included in the theme folder) or even plain HTML text
• The Twitter widget in the sidebar is likewise configurable. Enter your Twitter ID, choose whether or not to ignore @replies and Bob’s your uncle.
• This theme is not widget ready. If you try to add widgets they simply won’t show up. The default Twitter, Feeds, Recently and Pages is what you get. I’m sorry about this. This was one of the things I was working on when I ran out of time.
• I’ve tried to clean out most of the plugin-specific styling for the plugins I use. Simply delete the following files if you don’t want my plugin-styles to override the defaults:
  • styleextras.css
  • sociable_see_extras.css
• Like I said; Work in progress. Here be dragons. :)

If, however, you want to help out finishing this theme and / or add your ideas to it here is a list for you.

• The reason widgets don’t currently work is because I wanted to make it so that widgets would always be styled in a specific manner according to their position, rather than the type of widget. For example I wanted the next box on the right to be grey regardless of whether it was an archives widget or a recent posts widget. Anal much? Yes. Anyway; I made a JavaScript that assigns an extra class to each widget based on it’s position, or “number” if you please. It’s pretty much done except for making the graphics (getting the design to be height-agnostic is a real bitch). There’s some first attempts in the images folder if you want to give it a go
• The theme does not currently validate properly. It used to, and then I messed something up. Sorry.
• The comment styling is really messy. I’d consider working it over if I were you. (I’ll get around to it some day…)
• There’s probably more I should warn you about, but it’s late and I’m sleepy. I created this theme strictly for personal use, and although I’ve gotten rid of all absolute URLs and site-specific stuff I haven’t gotten around to cleaning up the code. I’m quite the salesman, huh?

So there it is. For the geeks, here’s a github link.
For the non-geeks, here’s a direct download to the theme zip-file.

Enjoy.

Just realized that I haven’t posted this pic yet this year. Throughout my blogging career misfortunes I’ve posted this photo every year about spring time. It just makes me happy. It’s a bit late this year, but here goes.

Original photo by Flickr user alexerde. Bastardized thoroughly by yours truly.
These two posts by Keith Peters do a marvelous job at summarising an age-old frustration that most ActionScript developers and I’m certain developers in many other languages, have either faced or actively promulgated.
Namely the attitude that while my language is certainly a robust and decent Object-Oriented Programming language, yours is obviously the stuff of programmer playgrounds and can hardly be considered programming at all.
I’ve broadly steered clear of participating in these pissing contests, but I’m sick to death of them and wish the collective programming community would grow the hell up and quit Balkanizing ¹ since we all seem to have flourishing and genuinely resourceful communities in each our camps.

The first post.
The second post that explains the first post to the hard of thinking, but is still worth a read to us really smart folks.

If you managed to visit this blog in the 10 minutes or so before this post goes live you might have been slightly befuddled by the fact that your address bar doesn’t say parallaxdenigrate.net as you might have expected, but rather ctrloptcmd.com.

So I’ve finally moved the blog to a new domain, and let me tell you; It wasn’t easy. Oh, exporting and importing the MySQL tables was a breeze and implementing the 301 redirect wasn’t too complicated. No, the challenge was in deciding on a domain name that wasn’t already taken. In the process I probably bought about 15 domains just to get one I liked enough to use.

Now, gentle reader, you might ask yourself “What the fuck is supposed to be the point of all this?“, to which I might reply; “Well, even if parallaxdenigrate.net was a amusing domain name to the likes of me who are blessed with an odd sense of humor, it’s not exactly what you’d call memorable. Try to tell someone to type in ‘parallaxdenigrate.net’ into their browser and you’ll see what I mean.” You, in turn may exclaim something along the lines of “Are you retarded? How the blazing hell is ‘ctrloptcmd.com’ easier to remember than your previous parrylaxy thingie? You suck. I’m not gonna read your blog anymore.” at which juncture in our fascinating exchange I might counter with “Aha! But if you just remember controloptioncommand.com, which naturally redirects to this, abbreviated form of the same sequence, I think you’ll find it immensely easier to keep lodged in your cerebrum the unified resource locator corresponding to this, my humble blog.” at which point you’ve probably left so I’d be talking to myself.

Regardless! Here it is, the new and not at all improved version 1.000001 of parallaxdenigrate controloptioncommand.

Although I’ll be keeping parallaxdenigrate.net online for a while just to make sure nobody gets lost, I’d strongly encourage you to update your bookmarks and feeds.

If you read this post, or maybe the FAQ on the about-page you probably know that the blog you’re reading is one of a triumvirate consisting of Parallax Denigrate dealing with tech stuff, Sleep Furiously dealing with mental hygiene and United States of Martin which collected the posts from the two in one “catch-all” site.

This took some effort to get to work properly, which has the effect on me that I get even more hell-bent on getting it done. And I succeeded with my endeavor if nothing else. However, the idea was flawed in its nature. First off; Separating content like this is what categories are for. Secondly; I never really wrote enough on Sleep Furiously for it to warrant a blog of its own. Thirdly; The maintenance needed to keep this project afloat was arduous. Whenever I wanted to update WordPress that became a substantial pain in the ass and I’m OCD enough that it really bugs me to see that “WordPress ‘better version than yours’ is out. Please upgrade.” every time I log in.

In short; it was fun but now it’s over. This means that If you were reading the Sleep Furiously or United States of Martin feeds you will need to change those to the feed from Parallax Denigrate.

So far the blog is mainly about coding and such, but there will be a category more resembling the posts at Sleep Furiously for whenever I do get around to writing about that part of my life.

I’m sure this won’t affect many of you, but again: This is the last post you’ll see on Sleep Furiously and United States of Martin. Those domains will be put to better use in the future.

That is all.