Tag Archives: Site

The Political Compass

For some time, I’ve had my web browser configured with its start page set to the random article link on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

The effect is that every time I open my browser, a new, random article on Wikipedia loads, which can often be severely distracting (so I make sure not to use this configuration at work!), but it’s almost always very interesting.

For instance, today the random link led me to this site: www.politicalcompass.org

Despite my skeptical view of questionnaires designed to pigeonhole your identity (think Myers-Briggs), I was immediately fascinated with the idea of the political compass, because it addresses a dimension (literally) of political viewpoints that the typical left/right dichotomy completely misses. It acknowledges that the traditional left/right spectrum is primarily (but not entirely) an economic scale, and it adds a second scale for social issues, with extremes it labels “authoritarian” and “libertarian.” I think the terminology is a bit muddled, since left/right would be better described as liberal/conservative or perhaps socialist/free market, but all of those terms have baggage. (Of course, in the United States, at least, so does “libertarian,” and the characteristics of “libertarianism” as described on the site are not entirely consistent with the Libertarian Party in the U.S.) Nonetheless, the terms are familiar enough to give a clear picture.

I was not too surprised to see where I ended up on the chart, although I did find it interesting that I was even farther down in the lower-left corner than the likes of Nelson Mandela and the Dalai-Lama!

(On a side note, writing this led me to another topic: the confusion of similar words. In my particular case, it was the old thorn in my side, farther vs. further. Luckily it seems I got it right. And writing the first sentence in this paragraph reminded me of yet another similar word problem: lead vs. led. I’ve noticed more and more lately, often coming even from respected sources, careless use of the word “lead” when in fact the intention was to use “led” — the past-tense of “lead” as pronounced “LEED.” But I digress [yet again].)

Now that’s just wrong.

I’m trying out Google AdSense on my site for the second time. Although on one hand I feel a bit like a tool (OK, I am a tool, but that’s beside the point), it is nice to potentially make a little money from these sites (even if it would take approximately 800 years to earn enough to pay for one month of hosting… if I weren’t getting the hosting for free).

Anyway… so as I said, I’m trying out Google AdSense on the site, hence those ugly ad panels in the left columns of all of the pages.

We’re off to a rocky start, though, and I have previously unexpected doubts over the accuracy of Google’s algorithms, having discovered that they put ads for nudist/naturist sites on a page of family photos! (And there was nothing of an illicit nature in those photos, I assure you…)

So, Google, consider yourself on double-secret probation. Don’t make me sic Marmalard on you!

So long, WordPress!

Well, that’s it. As of last night, the last traces of WordPress on my site are gone.

There’s nothing really wrong with WordPress; in fact, for what it does it’s pretty elegant and flexible. But since, let’s be honest, I’m a geek, and I’m more about building my site than actually creating any meaningful content for it, running it on someone else’s engine is unsatisfying, and almost feels like cheating.

Besides, WordPress (and probably any other third-party tool) will never do everything I want it to, or at least it won’t do it precisely in the way I want it to. And it’s more fun for me to write my own code than to tweak someone else’s. So here we go.

Progress…

I realized what a daunting task it was going to be to use the built-in WordPress functionality to manually copy over all of the articles from my old site database, so I dug under the hood and used the power of SQL to just more-or-less dump everything from one database into the other. So now all (well, most) of the stuff is moved over, and I can begin to disassemble the old site (currently lingering in the link set as “Room 34 Cold Storage”).

If you care to look back at the old stuff (and why wouldn’t you?), you may notice some oddities… that’s mainly due to inconsistencies between my idiosyncratic HTML and the fancy formatting/clean-up WordPress does. I’ll gradually fix that stuff… maybe. (Right after I get around to organizing the basement.)

I’m also tinkering more with the themes. I’ve downloaded several interesting themes that I plan to try out for a while, to get a feel for both their visual appeal as well as the ways they handle certain technical features of WordPress. Once I find one I like, I’ll use it as a basis to build my own, one that incorporates my photography as well. (Will the excitement never end?!)

Oh, I almost forgot to mention… some of the old stuff didn’t have dates, so I hastily and more-than-somewhat arbitrarily assigned them all to January 1, 2004.