Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Friday, November 8, 2002

Experiences of switching to a new Radio weblog theme -- Comment()
Matt Croydon::postneo answered my question about how easy applying the new theme was:

The transition went pretty well. I had also tweaked my old theme, adding links and blogrolls down the side. I saved my home page template so that I could keep these tweaks.

The next step was to turn upstreaming off in Radio. I didn't want things to go live until they were ready. I had to remove every reference of Veranda and Garamond from the movable type CSS file after applying the theme. I'm an Airal guy. It's clean.

After removing a few things like smaller fonts on links and adding a new section on the sidebar with my blogroll, I turned on upstreaming.

I opened Radio, and ran Tools -> Publish -> Entire website. A good backup of your www folder should be done beforehand.

Overall I'm pleased with the result. It didn't take a whole lot of time and was definately worth it.

Thanks for the answer! I think I'll have to look at my style definitions to make the new theme a bit more readable. But this is a good start, I believe. I also used the following hint on Centralized CSS in Radio:

If you would like to centralize your Radio CSS you can simple save your Style sheet as "#cascadingStyleSheet.txt" then place it in your "www" folder. Then simply add the <%cascadingStyleSheet%> macro to your template. Your CSS will be included where you included your macro.

-- Comment()
eWeek: "Adobe's PDF document-distribution format may seem entrenched among computing consumers, but that isn't stopping Microsoft from trying to throw its weight behind a competing publishing venture." [Scripting News]

-- Comment()
The new weblog template looks a bit different in OmniWeb and Chimera. I should probably try to validate the HTML code, because I made so many changes to the style files so rapidly. But everything works now ok, so perhaps I'll let this be for a while, and then try to do some polishing and checking.

Weblog Redesign -- Comment()
Matt Croydon::postneo writes: "I've been sick and tired of the radio theme that I had been using for quite some time. It had too many graphics and did not focus on the important part: the content. I've switched over to one of Radio's movable type themes. It's CSS (not tables like before), much lighter weight, and will be easy to customize. Right now font sizes are a little hardcoded, but I'll hopefully get things relative pretty soon."

Nice change! I sent the following e-mail to Matt:

I like your new theme, it is clean and light. I have also been thinking of moving to a CSS-based theme from the Radio "transmitter" theme.
How did the move to the new theme work out in practice? I have made quite a lot of (small) modifications to my theme, and would like to preserve some of them. I have copied some of these modifications to a text file for insertion into a new theme, but is there an easier way of doing this?

Resources on mathematics -- Comment()
Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics is a freely avaible resource on mathematics with "10,875 entries (more than one myriad), 96,394 cross-references, 4,894 figures, 183 animated graphics, 982 live Java applets, and counting..."

Another nice resource is Wikipedia, which has a section on mathematics: "Mathematics (from Greek mathema: science, knowledge, learning; mathematikos: fond of learning) is the study of patterns of quantity, structure, change and space. In the modern view, it is the investigation of axiomatically defined abstract structures using formal logic as the common framework. The specific structures investigated often have their origin in the natural sciences, most commonly in physics, but mathematicians also define and investigate structures for reasons purely internal to mathematics, for instance because they realize that the structure provides a unifying generalization for several subfields or a helpful tool in common calculations."

-- Comment()
MIT's Superarchive: "In September the Institute launched DSpace, a Web-based institutional repository where faculty and researchers can save their intellectual output and share it with their colleagues around the world and for centuries to come. The result of a two-year collaboration of the MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard, DSpace is built on open-source software and is available to anyone free of charge. But it[base ']s even more important to note that many believe this groundbreaking effort will fundamentally change the way scholars disseminate their research findings." [Privacy Digest]