A Practical Guide
UPDATE: Okay, I think I like this theme. It’s called Noto Simple and as you can see it has a bright, fresh look with only minimum stylings. Works well on mobile devices too. Quite a departure from the dark theme that anchored this site for many years. Let me know if you encounter any issue with it.
Bear with me as I experiment with a new theme or two for the site.
Back in 2011 I added the Google +1 button to this site as method to give you an easy way to recommend the content you’ve read to people who can use it. However, it appears that Google has recently decided to shutdown down Google+, the social network platform that that the Google +1 button was linked to. Consequently I have removed the Google +1 button from this site.
I have updated the Creative Commons Attribution license used on this site from version 3.0 to version 4.0. Version 4.0 features a number of improvements, primarily in the area of terminology that should now be better understood worldwide. What hasn’t changed is the rights granted by the license. Like its predecessor, the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license allows you to freely copy, distribute and transmit content made available on this site, to adapt it to something you may be working on, even make commercial use of the content. All I ask is that you attribute the original content to me in some way.
If you have any questions or seek additional information, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
Back in 2012 I installed Mint, a self-hosted web site analytics program, to this site. Since that time Mint has been anonymously collecting information on about who is referring readers to this site, which posts are most popular, top searches, etc. Sadly, the Mint development team has announced that sales and support has been suspended. I have no desire to use software that isn’t going to be maintained so effective immediately I will no longer be using Mint on this site.
So what did I learn from Mint while in use?
At the moment I have no plans to replace Mint with another web site analytics program. Should I decide to do so I will let you know. Rest assured though that anything I may decide to use will not collect personal data of any kind.
Most of the posts I author here contain code examples. To highlight these code examples I’ve been using the wordpress plugin SyntaxHighlighter Evolved. For the most part this plugin has served me, and I hope you, well. There are a few quirks, however, that continue to annoy me about this plugin. Chief among those quirks is the need to “minify” its Javascript and CSS following each update to maintain rendering performance. That and its lingering use of the Adobe Flash file format SWF for its copy-to-clipboard feature, even though that feature was deprecated.
So I’m making a change. I’m dropping SyntaxHighlighter Evolved for Crayon Syntax Highlighter, a nice syntax highlighter built in PHP and jQuery. It’s intuitive to administer and provides some welcome relief from those aforementioned annoyances. More importantly though it offers you some nice features. For example mousing over the highlighted code results in a drop-down box where you can toggle line numbers on/off (they’ll be on by default), toggle line wrapping on/off (longer lines will wrap by default), view plain code, copy the code, or view the code in a separate browser window. You can try these features yourself in the following example:
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cd /usr/local/ports/sysutils/foo make config make install clean |
In the next week or so I’ll begin transitioning older posts containing code examples over to this new plugin, and of course new post will use this plugin by default. Enjoy, and please let me know if you encounter any problems.