Category: BigSmoke.US

Blogging: quantity over quality

They say that blogging is a long way down from essaying. Articles were already better than essays, and books even more so. So they say. A lot is said these days. I say: the more, the merrier. I say: let us say! Let us say whatever we want. And let people read whatever they want, now that they can. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 8 months ago, on July 10, 2009, at 11:07 | No comments

100th post!

I just published the 100th post here on blog.bigsmoke.us. Who would have thought that when I published my first post? Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 10 months ago, on May 26, 2009, at 11:05 | No comments

Blog posts don’t need a point

I take blogging very literal. For me, the primary use of a weblog is to keep a log of (complicated) thoughts and activities. The reason to keep a log is very self-evident: to be able to find out how and why I came to some solution or how far I was in the problem-solving process. This becomes ever so clear to me when I find myself confronted with finding out something which I'm sure I already did. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 11 months ago, on April 15, 2009, at 21:04 | No comments

Finding a decent GeSHi plugin for WordPress

I like GeSHi (enough even to have written a language file for it). For ages now, I've used a WordPress plugin by Dan Peverill. But for as long as I've been using the plugin, I've been looking to get rid of it. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 11 months ago, on April 13, 2009, at 16:04 | 2 comments

Untangling WordPress’ core files from your local customizations

Since version 2.6, WordPress can be installed in its own directory, separate from your customizations and everthing. Needless to say, this makes upgrading a whole lot easier. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 1 year ago, on January 30, 2009, at 14:01 | No comments

Moving my traditional website content over to my blog

Cool URLs don't change, but the relevance of my content does (and it's declining). www.bigsmoke.us consists of content that has mostly never been updated. That's why I want to move it over to my blog here. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 1 year ago, on January 19, 2009, at 01:01 | 1 comment

New theme

After upgrading to WordPress 2.5.x, I had to fall back on a stock theme because my old customization of the Sandbox theme no longer worked with the upgrade. But, then, it was time to redo my theme anyway. So here you're looking at the first version of my new theme. I might have let it stabilize some more before putting it on-line, but who cares? My reader maybe? Let's just hope he or she doesn't use IE. ;-) Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 2 years ago, on July 13, 2008, at 17:07 | 8 comments

The joys of being well-known to Google

The "Places" system in the new Firefox 3 is great. I'm still getting more effective usage out of just the location bar every day. But, sometimes I'm on a different computer, or I haven't been to one of my web pages for a very long time. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 2 years ago, on July 12, 2008, at 17:07 | 2 comments

Upgraded Wordpress from 2.1 to 2.3.1

I'm now on WordPress 2.3.1. It was about time too; I was still on 2.1. Importing the tags from Ultimate Tag Warrior worked fine. Before upgrading and importing, I quickly patched my local version of WP with a little help from Subversion: Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 2 years ago, on November 26, 2007, at 00:11 | No comments

BigSmoke.US is no longer mine

Since my three previous posts [1, 2, 3], I've made over 7 phone calls to the US, alternating between Wild West Domains and NeuStar. And it turned out that, no, I'm not allowed to have a dot-US domain. So I gave it away. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 3 years ago, on August 10, 2007, at 16:08 | No comments