It seems like I was just introducing you all to Oddball V8 (I liked that name, too), and now version 9 just stomped in like a pro wrestler with ‘roid rage and kicked it out the window. Simply put, I got sick of the old look. I wanted a theme that I’d designed from scratch, and something a little more flexible and better-suited to my plans for this site. So here it is.

Version 9 came about a few weeks ago, when I had a sudden inspiration and put together a mock-up in Photoshop in the space of a single evening. I then left it alone for a couple weeks, having gotten bogged down with work and other issues, until finally returning to it a few days ago and embarking on a marathon mission to get it done and launched as soon as possible. Although I’ve got nearly a dozen posts in my mind that I want to put up, I felt compelled to hold them until the new design was online. There’s probably going to be a deluge of new entries here in the next few days.

The new look may be online, but a big portion of this facelift is still to come. It involves reworking the categories and tags on all the posts in the archive — a fairly monumental task, given that there are nearly 900 posts dating back to 2003. The categories a post is assigned to, rather than indicating the topics being discussed, will indicate what kind of post it is. I anticipate the new categories will be:

• Reviews – Scoring of video games, books, movies, etc.
• Commentary – Opinion on matters of great (or little) importance
• Rants – Anger-fueled tirades about one thing or another
• Journal – Life updates and personal happenings
• News – Heads-up about upcoming products, events or site updates
• Randomness – Off-the-wall, stream of consciousness stuff

Tags, then, will be used to indicate the topic(s) of a post, much as they do today, but I’m going to pare them back a bit so that they’re a little more broad. Rather than have a whole ton of tags that are only associated with one post each, I’d like to have some slightly more general tags like “video games,” “books,” “music,” “TV,” etc. — in a sense, these will be more like what the categories used to be.

As I start posting more reviews and things, I’ll probably work up some new sidebar widgets that highlight the latest reviews, including images and soforth, to make the sidebar a little more purpose-driven. In the meantime, though, what’s there will adequately service the archives as they exist today.

I hope this place becomes a little bit more interesting to visit in the coming days. As the Family Man says, “I’ll see ya here!”

I’ve just finished updating the underpinnings of Oddball Update, WordPress, to version 2.5, a milestone release with a lot of new features. Among the biggest changes are a totally redesigned admin area, which most of you don’t get to see. Too bad for you.

The part of the site that you do get to see is largely unchanged. There are three notable exceptions:

• The Archives page has a new (admittedly blander) look. I was previously using a plugin to generate some spiffy-looking archives, but the plugin is borked under WP 2.5, so for now it’s back to this basic layout.
• WP 2.5 has a cool new feature by which you can automagically install new versions of your plugins from right within the admin interface — no more FTP! To test it, I upgraded the AJAX Edit Comments plugin, and only then did I realize that I was deliberately not upgrading that plugin because of some problems it introduced last time. So, if you have any problems editing your comments after you submit them, let me know.
• I now display your Gravatar next to your name each time you leave a comment. For the uninitiated, Gravatars are “global avatar” images that you associate with your email address, and which will appear universally across every blog you comment on. Sign up to get your own Gravatar if you want one.

Other than that, it should be business as usual. If you see anything weird, just holler.

Heh…as soon as I got done grousing about the seemingly difficult-to-customize nature of the pMachine weblog system, I discovered a gem of a hack that does something extremely nifty.

You’ll notice that most of the entries on this site display only the first few paragraphs before providing a link to a page where you can read the rest of the post in its entirety. Rather than utilize two separate pages, however, the hack I just installed will display all of that content inline, on the same page. Clicking the link will simply toggle the visibility of the layer that contains it. Pretty sweet! Apparently, lots of people have used this on their pMachine sites to great effect.

I’ve noted that there’s a couple of minor cosmetic issues with Mozilla / Opera, and the somewhat annoying tendency for Mozilla to remove the focus from the page when you click to expand the extended content. (That is, you’ll click to read more, then your mouse wheel won’t scroll the page anymore until you click somewhere in the document window.) I hope to get that fixed shortly, but I’ve got to take off right at the moment. I’ll look after it when I get back this evening.

Hacks are a Good Thing™.