Hey hardcore Justinsomnia readers! Yeah, you! The folks who’ve actually got http://justinsomnia.org/ in your bookmarks. The folks who still periodically check my homepage for updates instead of subscribing to the feed. (I remember those days!)

I’ve just added a new feature with you specifically in mind.

At the bottom of the homepage, there’s now a handy little “Continue reading…” box. In the box is a link pointing to the left that says “« Older Posts”. If you click it, you’ll move back in time, by 8 posts.

This is handy if you haven’t checked my blog in a while and want to see what I’ve been up to recently—more than the 8 posts that appear on the homepage. Of course as you move beyond the homepage, a “Newer Posts »” link will appear, so you can navigate forward in time. It’s fun, try it!

Here’s a screenshot:

Happy Holidays from the fine folks at Justinsomnia. AKA me.

My goodness, it’s been two years since I last shook things up here at Justinsomnia Industries. For two years, dear reader, you’ve suffered that indescribable background color, affectionately known as #ddddaa. Much more likely, you passed those many months by reading from the comfort of your warm, cozy feedreader.

Well out with the old and in with the new. Justinsomnia‘s going blue. It’s time to Shift+Reload your browsers.

I’m sticking with the three column InformationOverload™ design, but hopefully the darker page background with the lighter post background will soothe your fried retinas.

Jason Kottke‘s blog layout inspired the new minimalist header bar, and I dropped all that magical CSS that allowed the site to resize horizontally in some browsers. That allowed me to tweak some nitpicky alignment issues that’d been bugging me since I finally grokked the box model. Now the text width is the same width as the images.

And no blog redesign would be worth blogging about without some new features right? Less is more bedamned! And I’ve got some doozies. Two to be exact.

First, site-specific Google searches (using the search box in the upper right) now appear in the the style of my blog. That’s something I’ve wanted for ages. It’s SO awesome, I stayed up still 2am last night tweaking it.

And second, I installed Rob Marsh’s uber-cool Similar Posts plugin for WordPress which is dynamically generating a list of 5 related posts at the bottom of every permalink page. It’s surprisingly effective, and a totally addictive way to cruise my 5+ years of archives.

Of course there’s countless other changes here and there. I (re)categorized most of my old posts, and exposed links to the category archives at the bottom of each post. And last but not least, I’ve finally got a 404 page, which will generate a potentially helpful search link if you mistype the URL, e.g.
http://justinsomnia.org/2007/10/hiking-the-bryce-figuree-8/

And that’s all folks. All I can remember.

$ svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.3
U    wp-pass.php
U    wp-rss.php
U    wp-login.php
...
Updated to revision 6166.

More information on the release can be found here: WordPress 2.3. Now you can tag your posts like it’s 2003!

Man, subversion is just the best thing since sliced bread. You can do it too! Easy to follow instructions can be found here:
Installing/Updating WordPress with Subversion.

I’m happy to walk anybody through the minutia of getting an svn install of WordPress set up for yourself (assuming you’re already comfortable with sshing to your webhost/server).

2.2.3 is a security and bug-fix release for the 2.2 series. Since this is a security release, we suggest you upgrade immediately. Two of the fixes are high priority.

$ svn info
Path: .
URL: http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.2.2
Repository Root: http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress
Repository UUID: 1a063a9b-81f0-0310-95a4-ce76da25c4cd
Revision: 5946
Node Kind: directory
Schedule: normal
Last Changed Author: matt
Last Changed Rev: 5850
Last Changed Date: 2007-08-04 22:43:11 -0700 (Sat, 04 Aug 2007)

$ svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.2.3
U    wp-includes/default-filters.php
U    wp-includes/plugin.php
U    wp-includes/query.php
G    wp-includes/formatting.php
U    wp-includes/feed-rss2-comments.php
U    wp-includes/rewrite.php
U    wp-includes/version.php
U    wp-includes/pluggable.php
U    wp-includes/widgets.php
U    wp-includes/rss.php
U    wp-includes/vars.php
U    xmlrpc.php
U    wp-mail.php
U    wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
U    wp-admin/admin-functions.php
U    wp-admin/rtl.css
U    wp-admin/options.php
U    wp-admin/install-rtl.css
U    wp-admin/widgets-rtl.css
Updated to revision 6065.
$

Done.

More info on how to here: Installing/Updating WordPress with Subversion

This is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I’m not sure why, as I’ve never been a big fan of podcasting, but I really like the idea of short, supplementary blog-embedded audio/video.

Recently I heard my voice in a video someone had taken and it both horrified and intrigued me. I’m just not used to hearing my own disembodied voice. It sounded deep and nasal and kind of goofy. But I wanted to hear more.

If you’d like to hear how I sound, here’s a recording of me reading my last post:

I sound like This American Life to myself. How hypnotic. Of course I sound different when I know I’m being recorded. More measured. Just recording this all alone on my 5 year old laptop with its built-in microphone made my heart beat loudly.