Bulbous, Not Tapered

WuCoco 0.10.1 is a small update that adds IE7 compatability.

Please don’t download IE7, though. Seriously. Internet Explorer has been an anchor tied to the leg of the web design community for years. CSS3 support is just around the corner, and it’s going to start all over again with the hacks and the new features that are supported by every browser but IE. Firefox is great, Opera is great, Safari is great. There’s really only one wrong answer, so do your part to make the web a better place and switch today.

Anyway, all ranting and no downloading makes Jack a dull boy. Get the one-column layout, the two-column layout, the three-column layout, or the image sources in Gimp XCF format (which haven’t changed since 0.10.0). Read the project page for the latest downloads and more information.

WuCoco 0.9.0 is the result of the first round of concerted development work on the theme since its creation and it’s chock-full of new features and bugfixes:

• Clean archives (Update: website for the clean archives plugin has disappeared) has been integrated to provide an information rich and inviting view of your post history. No fussing with plugins required.
• Author comments are now highlighted to stand out.
• The two-column layout is widget friendly.
• A bug that was causing the comment form border to occasionally render incorrectly has been fixed.
• Post margins have been made robust (previously many seldom used tags rendered without a margin)
• The stylesheets have been reworked to be ease future development.

Download the one-column layout, the two-column layout, or the image sources in Gimp XCF format. Read the project page for the latest downloads and more information.

Update ⁷⁄₁₈: This version is also known as 0.5.0.

This site is now running a pre-release copy of the next version of the WuCoco theme, which will be ready for public consumption soon. It includes several significant new features including author comment highlighting, clean archives style archives (Update: links to the clean-archives plugin all appear to be dead), widget support in the two-column theme, and a major stylesheet revamp to ease future development. Have a poke around and leave a comment if you have some feedback.

Not just grade A, I’m A+ and I have the papers to prove it. Or I should in 6-8 weeks. I took and passed the exams earlier this week. In some ways I feel a little silly about it, because it’s a lightweight certification that’s meant to demonstrate only very basic computer maintenance skills. I’ve put off doing the certification dance for too long though, and going through the process with an easy exam has been a good way to get my feet wet.

I took about 30 hours over two weeks to self-study, much of it spent reading the Osborne book, which I was fairly disappointed with. Although I did learn something useful from most of the chapters in the book, it’s badly edited. Technical terms are routinely misused, and many of the sample test questions are worded poorly enough to cause confusion even if you understand the material. If I had it to do over again, I might try the Sybex book in hopes that it was better.

Although there’s some basic conceptual knowledge required to pass the test, a good deal of it is fact recall. I made up a set of flashcards that I used to memorize the requisite bits. Download the flashcards in both granule deck format (granule is a gem, by the way… especially on the Nokia 770) and colon-delimited text format. If you use/improve them, please send me the updates and I’ll make them available here.

The latest version of the WordPress theme used on this site is now available. The updates are all documentation related, updating links to point to the new project page and preparing for submission to the WordPress Theme Competition.

Download the one-column layout, the two-column layout, or the image sources in Gimp XCF format. Read the project page for the latest downloads and more information.

Check out plungerpress.com for groovy political kitsch, including t-shirts with Donald Rumsfeld’s head in a mason jar. All products are hand-printed and shirts are nice quality cotton/poly tees by Hanes.

I’m not clear if this is a permanent web fixture or temporary art installation. It was incorporated into a recent graduate thesis in fine art at Cornell University. But it’s not obvious to me if it’s aiming to create a pop-culture brand to market and financially support the artist’s work, or if it’s an ironic critique of consumerism. Maybe it’s both. Anyway, act fast if you want to consume their products… supplies are limited!