First Post

Pretty much what it says.

This is a blog for musing on my hobbies, which are generally programming, languages and linguistics, and constructing fictional worlds.  It’ll probably be fairly technical, but I don’t aim to be confusing.  I often find that if I try to explain a how a project should work as if I were talking to someone who had no idea how it was supposed to work or what it was supposed to do, I start turning up all kinds of overlooked bugs, so this blog will serve as an outlet for some of that.  Regardless of whether anyone else reads or comments, I figure keeping this up will keep me moving.

An interesting design issue occurred to me while setting the theme up.  WordPress has a set of theme “features” that you can check or leave blank, which change the set of themes you’re looking at when browsing.  It’s interesting (to me) because it’s not immediately obvious whether checking a feature has the effect of restricting all your results to only those that have that feature, or expanding the results to include any theme that has that feature, regardless of what other features it has.  That is, will checking both “blue” and “black” show me only themes that have both blue and black, or all the themes that have at least one of either?  With the color options, the former seems slightly more likely to me, but other categories are explicitly exclusive (one column vs. two column vs. three column); if I check two-column and three-column both, I hardly want to see only the results that have both features (which I’m going to assume is 0).  I ran into the issue in a program I wrote, and I wound up doing it a different way – all the options are checked initially, and you uncheck options to exclude elements with certain features.  What you want depends entirely on what you’re listing and how exclusive your categories are, but I think it’s properly polite and user-friendly to explain how works in any case.

On another note, WordPress’s color categories failed to have a distinction for one of the few things that really matter to me in terms of color: whether the blog has dark text on a light background, or light text on a dark background.  I guess it’s probably obvious which I prefer, now that I’ve got this reasonably set up.

I have actual non-Wordpress-related things to talk about later, but this will do for now; I have to see if I can get a stuck window fixed.  It’s not Chicago, but it’s still pretty cold here in January.

~ by faiuwle on January 3, 2012.