In the early hours this morning the tinkering on the new design came to a decent stopping point, and I got it up and running. It took an hour or two to configure some of the new features, but building this thing offline beforehand definitely made the process go faster.

I hope the new layout is easier to navigate. It should also load quicker, as it has a smaller reliance on image-based navigation. A lot of the older entries look slightly odd in the new layout, but that’s life. Everything henceforth will be formatted with the new space limitations in mind, which ultimately should serve to be a much cleaner browsing experience.

This is version [3.0] of the blog, and I’m pleased to list the following new features:

• Music Calendar
  (with notification of upcoming releases on the main page)

• Random Lyrics Below the Banner
  (from an ever-expanding collection)
• Artist Tag Cloud
• Streamlined Archive Index

With all this back-end stuff finished, I can finally get around to doing some write-ups of all the fantastic music that’s dropped in the past few months. Stay tuned!

I was working on adding a new feature to the site, but it turned into a bigger project than I bargained for…

As a result, I’m currently working on a totally new design for the site. In my opinion, this is long overdue. When I decided to start focusing on music, the site was still built to be an all-purpose type thing. This new layout will reflect that, and also offer added functionality.

Ultimately, I’m hoping to slim the site down. I’m not a graphic design type person, and so I’m going for something minimal and highly functional. That being said, I will be out of the country for a few days, and so the project must go on hold. In an effort to make sure I complete the update, I’m posting this to keep myself honest; cat’s out of the bag now!

Aiming for mid-June. Torrential updating to follow.

Hoo-Buddy.
[Saying that takes me back to my Brak Blog days!]

We’ve come a long way since the inaugural of Schrödinger’s. This year’s birthday is especially salient given the recent and drastic changes the blog has witnessed. We are now what I’ve long understood to be a “real blog.” The content has a focus, and audience, which is more than I could ever say on its behalf before. Almost on a whim, I decided to throw off the final trappings what this blog used to be and morph it into a more ideal aggregation of news, music, and general commentary on life.

I did a little history-searching, and found the original blog: Braker. Oh man, just reading this, oh my god! I talk about pointing a gun at my driver’s ed instructor of all people?! The dude just wanted to teach me to drive! Where did I get off, I don’t know. Those early stages were rough though. I had no idea what I was doing, and blogging was a really new medium. Next up is The Brak Blog. Here I tried to tighten the screws a bit, and got accustomed to a paid hosting system as opposed to the free services. The funny thing is, in talking about “what worked” in my retrospective on Brak Blog, we have abandoned almost everything that was successful about that format. Schrödinger’s has been an extension of that, but slowly it has progressed and transformed in increments to achieve its current form.

Finally forsaking the song titles, I think, is what did it. Instead of placing undue emphasis on needing to write an entry that fit the song I wanted to share with people, I just started writing a music blog. Which I should have done a long, long time ago. By parsing that with the intermediate rant on politics and my nerd forays about anime or Firefox, I think the blog has finally reached a good equilibrium. I know this because posting rate has skyrocketed. Not just quantity, but quality too has gone up with more to talk about than meandering anecdotes. These changes have increased our visibility, and in turn we have people checking back more often, reading more posts, and even commenting sometimes!

This is all very exciting, and I’m going to continue pursuing this idea of a “real blog” with conviction. I stood by idly in high school as the blog format evolved around me, content to just do with it what I wanted, and continued to ignore that trend well through this current effort. But I’m tired of the damn thing just being a vehicle for stories that aren’t that funny to begin with, and really just became amalgamations of stuff I did. That’s not interesting in a general sense. Commentary on music, politics, and technology, however, has an audience.

The true test will be if I can keep this up during school. This summer is encouraging though. Even if post rate drops to half its present frequency, that’s still multiple posts a week, something that would have once seemed impossible. WordPress makes a lot of this possible, with stuff being so easy to add to posts, move around, and include multimedia aspects. Things have changed here at Schrödinger’s. I think for the better.

Thus, I just thought you should know you’re looking at Schrödinger’s Blog: 3.0. I’ll continue to get the site acclimated to the new changes, and I still have a few layout tweaks in store. In a few months, I’m going to submit to Hype, which I’ve said before is a big goal of mine, that also would serve as a good motivating factor to keep it up.

All this has got me thinking about what I’m going to do in another year. The Brak Blog was always a four-year-mission, but I left this current project a little ambiguous. Another change, or should we stick it out? We’d certainly be in the market for an overhaul, either way. But that’s a ways off, yet.

For now: Happy Birthday, dear blog.
It’s fitting that we should celebrate your growth in content as well as years on the same day.

In the continuing effort to get the blog cleaned up and looking more presentable, as well as with the advent of the use of tags to offer a different organizational scheme for the music-blog component I’m trying to break in right now, I noticed and error.

The title of the page which listed all posts with a (tag) was all garbled:
“::Schrödinger’s Blog:: >> (tag)Category Archive for (tag) Archive”
Where (tag) was the name of the tag; we’re using it for the artist’s name. I’ve never had issues with our title code before, and I’ve been putting off fixing it since we started using them just a little over a week ago. Tonight I bit the bullet and began to try and decipher why this thing was acting so stupid. What our title code looked like was this:

<?php bloginfo('name'); ?>

<?php bloginfo('description'); ?>

The big ugly thing in the middle is the important part. The long story shortened is that I found out that ‘function_exists(‘ ‘)’ actually calls for a plugin. In my case, it was calling for a plugin called ‘is_tag’. Um, OK? Kinda weird given I’ve never heard of that thing, much less installed it; why would I call it in the code?

Well, turns out that the tutorial I used to build my theme, just over two years ago during the Great and Final GreyMatter Crash, just had you arbitrarily insert that chunk of code. Which is fair, given that I’d have no idea how to write code like that just jumping into WordPress cold… but why the random plugin? I looked it up: it makes sense, given the function, but the tutorial never prompts you to download it…

Anyways. That’s fixed! Turns out just blasting that first ‘if’ argument fixes the whole thing! So, check off the list. I also rigged the year to automatically roll over down in the faux copyright, so no more of that awkward January-February time when I forget to update it, and everyone just kinda bites their lips and goes “Um, Tom, I don’t know how to tell you this…”

You might have also noticed that I’m working to slip in direct links to all of the posted mp3s. They look kinda like this: [ mp3 ♫ ], except the actual one is a link. I left the embedded player in because I feel that it is classy as hell, coordinating with our color scheme and whatnot (which took time to do, by the way). But those direct links are needed if we’re ever gonna get aggregated on Hype, so there they are. Also I guess you could download the file if you wanted, but I can’t really support that from a legal standpoint, blah blah blah.
(If the Unicode music note doesn’t show up for anyone, let me know. It shouldn’t be like a weird proprietary thing, but if it comes up as nonsense I want somebody to tell me.)

Still on the list:
New Banners – [when I get home]
Comment Form – [has always sucked and now has these strange little blank avatars since I don't even know when. I'm just gonna get rid of them.]

I found this little tool somewhere online the other day, and thought it was worth looking into. AddThis is a little button/gizmo that allows a browser of the the site to instantly push content they want to share to any one of some 50-odd social networking sites. Now, if you know me, you know that I really do not care for the ol’ social networking thing. Something about it still strikes me as… oh I don’t even know.

I don’t like it and, largely, I don’t us it.
But other people do! If you are one such person, and you feel so inclined, we now have a “Share this Observation” feature located after the meta info for each entry. Mouse-over for the main options, click it for the whole song and dance. [the notion that I've opened the doors to people aggregating my site to bebo is sickening... to say the least.]

That aside, I have a small gripe. Apparently, it is beyond the powers of the great and magnificent AddThis monolith to enable a relatively simple request. If you decide to install the AddThis feature using the WordPress Plugin from AddThis, you can’t pick where you put the damn thing. They let you customize a whole manner of things, colors, features, images, but not WHERE. This struck me as kindof silly. All the AddThis code appears to be is a link to a small javascript hosted at their server; the object itself is about handful of lines of code:

<a href="http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&pub=xa-4a6396e4416cf507"
onmouseover="return addthis_open(this, '', '[URL]', '[TITLE]')"
onmouseout="addthis_close()" onclick="return addthis_sendto()">
<img src="http://s7.addthis.com/static/btn/lg-share-en.gif" width="125" height="16" alt="Bookmark and Share" style="border:0"/></a>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://s7.addthis.com/js/250/addthis_widget.js?pub=xa-4a6396e4416cf507"></script>

I’d just installed the plugin, and was rather irritated to see it sitting, smugly, to the left, at the end of the entry. As you can see (at the time of writing) all the meta data is clearly on the right-hand side of the page. Such a displeasing destruction of symmetry is inexcusable, even here at the blog-hack-capital of the internet, Schrödinger’s Blog. The above is the code they provide for you to just install it on any ol’ website. I looked at that, and thought, “it really can’t be that hard to get that thing working the way I’d like.”

Turns out, a manual install of AddThis to a WordPress blog is easier than I thought. I don’t know a ton about how this hunk-a-junk works, but I knew that AddThis essentially just calls for a URL and a title for it to pass on to all those other services. I know from programming the template for this site that two such tags exist:

<?php the_permalink() ?> - For the link to the entry
<?php the_title(); ?> - For the entry's name

So… you grab those, stick them in where AddThis supplies [URL] and [TITLE], and game over. It functions just the way it would if you installed the plugin, but now you’re free to stick that little chunk of code wherever you’d like in your template! I slung mine over to the right, and used one of the AddThis images available for download, just to slim down the entire affair. My final code appeared as follows:

<a href="http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=20"
onmouseover="return addthis_open(this, '', '<?php the_permalink() ?>', '<?php the_title(); ?>')"
onmouseout="addthis_close();"
onclick="return addthis_sendto();">Share the Observation <img src="http://schrodingersblog.com/images/plus.gif" alt="Share This" style="border:0"/></a>

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://s7.addthis.com/js/250/addthis_widget.js"></script>

So. That was a fun little project. It was something I’d been meaning to play with. I get irritated when projects like that pop up, but it’s a good opportunity for a little spot of problem solving and I always feel pretty badass when I can code my way out of an annoying problem. [Also: Big thanks to Damnit Jim! for the WP_CodeShield plugin]

Finally: My quest continues for a good plugin for “buy” or “purchase” links. I don’t want to scare anyone into thinking I’m trying to mine money off of this godforsaken little blog. I’m just trying to gear it up as a music-blog that I might one day submit to Hype Machine or elbo.ws, and they’re pretty particular about making sure you give readers the opportunity to purchase the artist’s music. I really like what billy’s done over at TWF, but either he did that by hand, or the plugin has a name I can’t think of.