I've been doing a little spring-cleaning of the old blog now that I've started writing in it again. I installed the WP-Syntax and WP LaTeX plugins and went back through my old posts to prettify up the code blocks and equations. I think I've got most of them (with the exception of a few bits of code that are in languages that I made up, so the plugin doesn't understand them, and a few odd here and there).
There are so many LaTeX and syntax highlighting plugins available for WordPress, though - I have no idea if the ones I'm using are the best. I ended up just using the "most popular" search on the WordPress plugins page and picked the first results for "syntax" and "latex" that looked like they would do what I wanted, on the theory that the most popular ones would be the best. They seem to work well enough but I do worry a bit that at some point I will find they're missing some important feature and I'll have to switch plugins and go back and update all my old posts again.
I also went back and fixed any typos and mistakes in equations that I noticed while doing the updates, and updated with new developments such as the mention of the Eclipse of Mars illusion in The undiscovered colour and the 75 ohm load in CRTC emulation for MESS.
I also want to change my theme (Default is okay but I think it belies how much work I put into this thing). I'll probably change it to Twenty Eleven with a custom header unless someone with better design taste than me has a better suggestion. I need to find a better way to do centering of large images as well. The current way still mostly works but occasionally collides with the links over on the right, and there's a lot of pictures without the correct stylesheet class. I also want to fix the ordered list style - I'd much prefer nice round bullets to those chevrons.
To make the banner I wanted to take a big pile of pictures that I had made especially for blog entries and just sort of stick them all together at random in a big jumbled collage with some nice blending between them. I thought it would be easy to find software to do this but there's about a million "collage maker" programs, almost all of them "trial-ware" and all of them completely useless for the purpose. It seems that to do a jumbled collage in any of them I'd have to individually add, place and rotate each picture. I found one with a wizard that did an automatic layout with blending, but you can't change the blend radius to anything other than "hardly noticeable at all", the pictures are forced into a grid layout and the program is buggy anyway (and won't let you save in the trial version, but doesn't seem to mind you taking a screenshot of the finished result).
So I think I'm going to write my own automatic collage maker. Shouldn't be too hard, and that way it'll be easy to update the header as I add new images.
One other thought that came to mind as I was going through all my old posts - this blog used to be a lot more picture heavy than it is at the moment. I have a big backlog of pictures (over 2 years worth) that I do eventually want to put up here - I'll probably do a month a day at some point. Most of our pictures these days are taken by Gennie, though, and she tends to put them up on her flickr. There will be some overlap with that, though I don't think I'll be including all the food pictures here (I know I have in the past but that was before Gennie started using flickr).