As of today, I’ve been blogging at SanBeiJi.com for eight years. Happy birthday, blog!

The original blog was a hand-rolled PHP/MySQL app, before Michael insisted that I upgrade to WordPress. It was actually a fun little SQL mapping exercise to get my old posts integrated into WordPress’ format, and I’m amazed it worked as well as it did, all things considered.

If you’re wondering what San Bei Ji means, there’s a fine article about it on Wikipedia.

三杯雞好吃!

Good friend Matt has started a blog for his poetry, called Quarkonium, and it is an instant hit. WordPress.com has it listed as the featured blog tagged with “poetry.” Congrats to Matt for getting this off the ground finally!

There was a time when I would enthusiastically write poetry, but that has been beaten out of me over the years. I still like to read though. Bukowski is probably my favorite.

Migrated to WordPress 2.5 this evening, which was a nice and painless upgrade. In the process I discovered an old and useless plugin that had been left turned on, and disabling that pig made my whole site so much faster – it was killing me to find the reason why this thing was so pokey before and I can’t believe I didn’t see it before.

The new admin interface designed by Happy Cog is instantly tons more usable. Everything else seems to work fine, including the iPhone happiness.

I had to change web hosts. The old one was down way too often. Unfortunately, this one seems to be not without their own set of issues. Still trying to find out why Unicode characters didn’t import right into the database and why .htaccess configurations continue to fail. Hmmm…

Oh and for some reason the old theme doesn’t like the new server. It was time to go anyway. Thanks for all the fish! I’ll figure something out as we go along.

It’s time to redesign. I’ll use my traditional method of blowing everything away and starting from scratch.

Also upgraded to WordPress 2.3 today. Noticed some of my categories are missing. This is a first for me – usually the upgrades go pretty well.

I wonder what design I’ll come up with…

I also need to find a new web host.

So pardon the dust. This is a work in progress.

Well, so far this year has been tough at best, so it is time to look forward.

As I sit here suffering a thankfully rare but severe reaction to gluten that will undoubtedly keep me awake the rest of this evening, I am contemplating what things I need to do to get life looking up again:

• First of all, I think the basics are covered. I’m getting excellent grades in my masters program, and I’m exercising regularly. We bought a recumbent exercise cycle and I found that a laptop perched on my nice wooden music stand allows us to use the computer while we pedal. Watching DVDs, doing homework, reading papers, surfing the web, or listening to podcasts all make it very productive time, which was the main reason why I wasn’t exercising before. I have found the auto-scroll feature in Acrobat Reader to be particularly handy for reading while exercising. But I certainly could be eating a bit more healthy – less chips and beer, more fruit and wild rice.
• I decided finally that, given my career as a web geek, playing ensemble with my double bass just isn’t going to happen anymore. I don’t have time. I will never have time. I might have time for a few people to come over and jam on Dvorak and Schubert, but the reality is that I know very few good string players out here in the burbs. However, what I do have time for is practice – late nights, weekends, whenever I can get a few minutes. The whole reason I got into the double bass in the first place was to play solo music, so it’s time to get back to my roots and string that thing up with some solo gauge Thomastiks. Heck, this is how Yingwen and I hooked up in the first place: She was a pianist that played the double bass; I was a bassist in need of a good and willing accompanist; one late night rehearsal after another and…
• I will never apologize for not blogging, but I do intend to write more. And by the way, I am sick of being hosted on a non-PHP5 server. Looking for new digs for this site. And I really should start learning Ruby.
• “But what about Ajax?” I can hear some of you saying… Well it is true that every single damn job posting out there these days asks for someone who is god of Ajax and all things server-side. Great – you know, I read Jeremy Keith’s book on DOM Scripting, played around with some of the frameworks, and for whatever reason I’m still not digging it. There are too many hacks, failovers, workarounds, and the rest of it for me to fall in love with this language. In most cases when I come across a deep and serious problem in my web team with an application, it is because of an over-reliance on Javascript. So I’ve decided to keep it in the utilitarian mode for now until such time as I can further dive down properly into it later this year.
• Finally, the guitar deserves a little attention since that has actually improved dramatically over the past half year or so. I really should firm up my technique and stop slouching that instrument over my right leg all the time.

How does one find the time to practice two instruments, go to school, work full time and have a family? Simple: Give up television.

I am a fan of the Google Reader application for managing my RSS subscriptions. The advantage of having all my feeds organized in one convenient web repository is proving to be quite handy (much as del.icio.us has been for bookmarks) and I like Readers’ own ability to produce new RSS feeds from my content categories.

But the UI, much like a lot of Google’s apps, leaves a lot to be desired. (Gmail – I’m looking at you.)

Fortunately, Jon Hicks has put some lipstick on this pig. Enter Google Reader Theme. Installation is fairly trivial, and the result is a more pleasant and usable interface. As of this writing, it works for Firefox, Camino, Opera, Omniweb, and Safari.

Nice work! Looks much better now – thank you.

Jon also mentions he was using CSSEdit for the skinning work. I like this tool – have been using it since somewhere in the 1.x days. I find it very useful for quickly digesting the styles in an existing theme, such as an open-source project that I want to skin by leveraging existing styles. For starting from scratch, nothing can beat TextMate or Dreamweaver for cranking out standards-compliant XHTML and CSS in rapid-fire mode.

This is a great capability, to be able to create your own skins for sites you visit frequently. User customization supports even further the idea that we as web developers need to continue to separate content from design as much as possible, to produce semantic, meaningful markup, and to make our code as simple and as well-documented (self-documenting/semantic) as you can.

After upgrading WordPress, I decided I couldn’t stand the old design any longer. I clobbered it. This theme from the WordPress Theme Viewer is called ChinaRed.

In the next year or two, I’ll start to redesign this blog again. Like I have time…

I thought about going naked on this blog and redesigning from scratch, but I know I won’t have much time over the next five weeks as I finish classes.

It has also become painfully clear that I have too many categories going on here. I must have confused that taxonomy feature with free-tagging, which I think should probably be a separate feature.