My new website is finally online, in time for a conference I’m attending… I hope you like it, I think I ended up with something that’s quite similar to what I originally had in mind. Rounded edges and transparency work with all the major browsers I’ve tried, and the rest should be standards-compliant. If anyone has better coding ideas for those, I’m quite open to ideas, as long as I don’t have to do rounded edges with graphics – I once attempted to make a site like that and it was Such A Pain I’d rather not try that again.

Anyway, while I was searching for a Wordpress theme I came across the nastiest idea how to make money off your free theme, I thought I’d share (I was so angry!).

1. Make a super spiffy website with your theme
2. Make the theme available for free
3. Require a registration to access theme documentation
4. Let the registration have two levels, free and “premium” (i.e., paid)
5. Have users register….
6. ….to find out all of the documentation is “premium content”

I think this is really dishonest (especially since the theme was trickier than most Wordpress themes, which usually don’t really need documentation… though IMO everything benefits from a few well-placed comments in the code, and Wordpress is no exception). Why not just ask people to pay up front? Sheesh. Anyway, I settled for a different theme, Aerodrome. This also has a premium version, but I actually like the free version better, so I’m quite pleased, at least for the time being.

I hope no one is bored by my choice of brushes for the header art, but I really like both Dot Splatter and Splat Circles. I’ll try not to use them on a fourth site ;]

I’ve come up with a set of categories that will hopefully partition the set of my interests, in the mathematical sense… though I can already see “sci” and “tech” and also “game” and “art” overlapping. But I don’t want to use tags for something that basic, because then I’d end up with a million posts tagged with “sci” and “art” etc. and it would make the tag cloud useless.

I’ll try to post something in each category relatively soon, we’ll see how it goes… I think I’ll write a kind of introduction/assessment for each category, just to summarize what kinds of things I will post, what will be posted where, etc.