{"id":1363,"date":"2011-08-11T16:00:12","date_gmt":"2011-08-11T23:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/?p=1363"},"modified":"2011-08-08T21:35:06","modified_gmt":"2011-08-09T04:35:06","slug":"blog-updates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/blog-updates\/","title":{"rendered":"Blog updates"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a> and WP LaTeX<\/a> 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).<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> and the 75 ohm load in CRTC emulation for MESS<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I also want to change my theme (Default<\/a> is okay but I think it belies how much work I put into this thing). I'll probably change it to Twenty Eleven<\/a> 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. 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<\/a> but that was before Gennie started using flickr).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogging"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1363"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1365,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1363\/revisions\/1365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}