Yesterday’s Thoughts

My observant readers, had I any, would notice that the blog has a new name, Yesterday’s Thoughts. Generally my posts come about two beats after the issue I am discussing has faded into the background. I consider this a strength; journalism is the first draft of history, I’ll aim for the first revision of history.

[Th|K]ing Baker was an attempt at anonymity. It was unpronounceable and even I didn’t like it anymore. I am happy that I just took a name and started writing, but now I can move forward with something better and if I don’t like it in the future, I’ll change it again.

I have done some other housekeeping. There was a persistent problem that some pages wouldn’t validate because of unencoded ampersands — I installed the Amputator plugin which seems to work pretty well once I got the permissions set so that Apache could read and execute it.

This left a few validation problems related to blockquote tags. I think this is a Movable Type bug. If I enter multi-paragraph block quote it ends up marked up incorrectly in the html.

Here is what I was writing:

My introduction of the quote:



A first quoted paragraph.
A second quoted paragraph.

and Movable Type emitted:

My introduction of the quote:

A first quoted paragraph.

A second quoted paragraph.

This doesn’t validate because the tags aren’t nested appropriately. I changed the way I entered the text.

My introduction of the quote:



A first quoted paragraph.

A second quoted paragraph.

Here is what Movable Type now emits:

My introduction of the quote:

A first quoted paragraph.

A second quoted paragraph.

This validates correctly.

Once I got the ampersands under control, I restored the names of my categories. This post is now in the “Software & Internet” category instead of the “Software and Internet” category. I think the former looks better, and takes less room.

I also went through and added categories to posts. As I noted before, just because something is in a subcategory (Movable Type for this post) doesn’t mean that it appears in the parent category (Software & Internet.) This breaks the navigation from the main page. If you click on the Software & Internet link over to the right, you go to a page that doesn’t include any recent entries, because all my recent entries in this category were primarily assigned to other categories (Windows, Linux, Synchronization, etc.) I assigned all posts to the the parent category manually, for now, but I am going to have to rethink that use of categories in this blog. This is too much trouble.

While I was installing Amputator, I also installed the Smarty Pants plugin. Smarty Pants is supposed to add typographically correct symbols for quotes, em- and en-dashes, etc. It’s not working, I don’t know why. I’m not getting any errors, or having any other problems.