In Nomine – The Lotus Land

The typesetting and webdesign industry has apparently been using the ‘lorem ipsum’ text for a while to provide a dummy text in order to test print and layout.

Aside from the fact that the text is a cut off section of Cicero’s de finibus bonorum et malorum, it also fails in one huge aspect, namely globalisation.

The text is Latin, latin is the simplest of all characters we have available to us on the world-wide web. If your website is English only then, yes, you are quite done. However for a lot of us we also have to support languages other than English, the easiest of which are Latin-derived scripts.

Latin, and subsequently English, are both written left-to-right. Hebrew and Arabic, to take two prime examples, are written right-to-left (leaving numerals aside for the moment). Of course, this is very important to also test since it means a lot of change is needed for your lay out.

Especially when testing your design for sites that need to display multiple languages on the same page it is pertinent to test with multilingual text. One of the things that should quickly become clear is whether or not a sufficient encoding has been chosen.

The website should now look a bit better again, especially on the reading side.

I am aware the current CSS for the website is not yet taking advantage of the width of the monitor. I am adjusting the most recent version of this template along with Wordpress 2.5. Hopefully during the week.

I think Robin Hobb said it quite eloquently in her article on weblogs.

Therefore, God and the gods are only convenient means–themselves of the nature of the world of names and form, though eloquent of, and ultimately conducive to, the ineffable. They are mere symbols to move and awaken the mind, and to call it past themselves. This recognition of the secondary nature of the personality of whatever deity is worshiped is characteristic of most of the traditions of the world. In Christianity, Mohammedanism, and Judaism, however, the personality of the divinity is taught to be final–which makes it comparatively difficult for the members of these communions to understand how one may go beyond the limitations of their own anthropomorphic divinity. The result has been, on the one hand, a general obfuscation of the symbols, and on the other, a god-ridden bigotry such as is unmatched elsewhere in the history of religion. For a discussion of the possible origin of this aberration, see Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (translated by James Strachey; Standard Edn. XXIII, 1964).

Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Fontana Press, 1993; pg. 258

As Yoda says in Episode III – Revenge of the Sith:

The fear of loss is a path to the dark side. Death is a natural part of life. Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force. Mourn them, do not. Miss them, do not. Attachment leads to jealously. The shadow of greed that is. Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.

As might be evident from the non-matching colours and all that, I am currently reworking the design to really become what I had in mind a while ago.

During all this I encountered a lovely problem with Internet Explorer and its support for PNG, namely that it is mucking around with the gamma setting, regardless of what the PNG specifies. (A even more detailed background is available in the form of Henri Sivonen’s excellent article on the matter.)

So right now I am stripping the gamma (gAMA) header from my PNGs in order to have it working across most browsers (it seems Safari 1.3 has issues with PNGs on a lot of fronts).
So in short: no matter what the Internet Explorer team fixes, they seem to screw up in other magnificent ways and this is what sets them so apart from, say, the Opera team. Instead of not taking blame the Opera team actively ask people to report problems back so that they can see if it is a real problem with their product.

As you might have noticed I am actively restructuring the site layout. If some things break or stop validating, well, you know whom to blame. :)

In the coming days I will overhaul the design of the site, so bear with me while adjusting. ;)

Drupal is a nice system if you need an advanced CMS-like environment. Which I didn’t.

Hence I moved to WordPress, since I need a well-maintained piece of weblog software. The only downside at the moment is that it is written in PHP.

Conversion was not too hard. I followed directions as posted on http://spindrop.us/2006/05/19/migrating-from-drupal-47-to-wordpress and only had to change some things.

I want to keep the category ‘Uncategorized’ in order to have a sane default. So you can perhaps just leave out the ‘delete from wp_categories;’ step. Furthermore I had to use this SQL statement in order to move the posts over, since I was running Drupal 4.6:

INSERT INTO wp_posts (id, post_date, post_content, post_title, post_excerpt, post_name, post_modified)
SELECT DISTINCT n.nid FROM_UNIXTIME(created), body, n.title, teaser, REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(LOWER(n.title), ' ', '-'), '.', '_'), ',', '_'), '+', '_'), FROM_UNIXTIME(changed)
FROM drupal.node n
WHERE type='blog' OR type='page';