Oddball Update

“V4, that is not the Doctor.” No, but this is the fourth incarnation of the Oddball Update—and this time it’s all-original from the ground up. And with that, I’d like to take a moment to officially introduce the new site to you. Or you to the site. Semantics, really. Come on in, pull up a chair, stay a while. Or don’t. Whatever you want.

The whole bloody thing was conceived on a whim, folks. Actually, I’ve had this nagging desire to throw away Oddball v3.0 since…well, the day it launched. OU3 was a bastard child, a product of some decent coding, a phoenix risen from a failed PHP experiment if you will…but the design took a backseat to all the programmatical hackery. In fact, the design of OU3 was…gasp…based on a template. Loosely, yes, and with many modifications, including the totally-original masthead photochop. Somewhat uninspired photochop, maybe. But original.

Anyway, the whole damn thing was an insult to my existence, so away it went. Now, I present to you this fully XHTML Strict compliant zen masterpiece. Okay, so it’s not zen, nor is it a masterpiece. I’ll admit I chose form over function in some places. But it works well almost everywhere, and it’s certainly got its target demographic covered. So on with the show, I say.

As for new features, well, what have we got here. It’s pretty much the same Oddball you know and love [?] except with a new skin. I’m particularly pleased with the space-saving navbar on the right, which is divided into three tab-like pages which you can toggle amongst. You can even hit Alt+1 through Alt+3 to switch them around, woooo aren’t you cool. I also got the “Top Commenters” idea to work finally, so now it doesn’t duplicate Pooch for unknown reasons. It’s on the colophon tab with the rest of the site statistics, by the way.

Somebody wrote a plugin for ExpressionEngine that’s supposed to keep track of new posts and comments since your last visit to the site. It doesn’t seem to work worth a goddamn, however, so I decided not to implement it yet. The logic behind it is severely flawed, rendering it effectively useless, and the maddening part is that I know how I’d fix it if I could just translate those wonderfully good intentions into actual PHP code. One of these days I may attempt it.

I’m still getting around to skinning the search pages, the member list and all that conflabbin’ “extra” stuff that looks really dull and generic. Yeah, I think I said the same thing when I launched OU3, but I sure never did anything about it then. I think this time will be different, since I actually like this design and don’t wish to vomit each time I look at it. However, hacking the template on those pages is painful so I’ll probably not be doing it anytime soon, mind.

Also, I did away with the little calendar thing. It’s gone, I tell you! How will we ever get along without it! Actually, it was like a “blog cliche,” so I deemed it expendable.

Frighteningly, I’ve been reading a lot of other blogs on the ‘net lately. They’re almost like…reading somebody’s diary. Hey, that’s EXACTLY what they’re like! And perhaps it’s the drugs talking, but I find that sort of thing really quite fascinating. Hey, here’s somebody with a really screwed-up life. Let’s read about it! It’s like the “old ladies on the block” phenom. Everything that goes on in the neighborhood becomes card table discussion. I dunno, I guess what it comes down to is a strange sort of kinship I feel with other people who blather on about complete non-sequiturs. I don’t know who these people are, but for some reason when I read someone else bitching about the dastardly punk who was going 25 miles an hour right in front of them ON THE FREEWAY, I want to cry out, “Right on, brother!” Or sister, as was the case with that particular blog. Uh, I digress. Severely.

Okay, I’ve got a real randomness streak running in me right at the moment, which could—if you’re lucky—spawn some really psychotropic babbling on the site here later tonight or tomorrow. I’d get to it right now, but, see…Battlestar Galactica’s coming on in about eight minutes, so I’m gonna hit the post button and leave now. All right? Oh shit, wait—after I hit the post button, I have to hit the deploy button, or no one’s actually going to be able to read this.

And what good is a blog that no one can read? That’s like…a diary and stuff.

Hey! That’s EXACTLY what it’s like!

Oh, I forgot to mention: If you have any catastrophic problems with the new design, like it gives you epilepsy or something, call 911. If it gives you other, non-medical type problems, email me and I’ll see what I can do to fix it.

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