I just wanted to thank you, the fine readers of this site, for my new monitors that are on their way. I just ordered 2 of these 21.6" Samsung monitors to go with my newly set up my reasonable developer workstation.

I'm thanking you wonderful people because the money to pay for it came mostly from those of you who are signing up with Dreamhost for Subversion hosting and using my discount code. Over each of the last 6 months or so, a few of you have signed up and I've slowly built up commissions from their affiliate program.

I decided when I signed up for that program (as well as several of the other advertising programs I'm running here) that the money would be used for my hardware upgrades. There hasn't been enough in any one month to buy much of interest, leaving me to not really ever even check in on it all that much. Then, I discovered enough sitting there to buy the dual 22"-ish (they're 0.4" shy, but considerably cheaper than the real 22" from Samsung) monitors that I like and want.

Once those show up, that workstation will be set up pretty much like how I want it and I can just do tweaks like more RAM as I feel the pain and just enjoy the huge desktop real estate this will provide. While I can see a 4 monitor setup (or even 3) as something I really want, I don't think I've got enough desk space at the moment to make that happen.

Oh, and for those asking for pics of the new setup, I might get around to it, but am first working to clean up the mess that is obscuring pretty much everything in my office first. If I took pics of what it looks like right now, I'd die from embarrassment. However, there's no way I'll get the monitors in there if I don't clean it up, so hopefully that will prompt a cleanup and I can take a picture of the whole works.

So, to those of you who set up Dreamhost accounts and Subversion repositories because of my articles, thanks for the new monitors!

Just a quick note to say that I flipped the switch and the new theme (Version 4.0) is live. It crossed my threshold for being close enough that it's time to shine the light of day on it. After as many themes found their way to the bottom of the trash can, I wanted to shove this one out the door even if that meant a couple of edges weren't 100% polished.

As I undoubtedly missed something (or many somethings), leave a note with any bugs you find and I'll turn that list into a round of bug fixes.

I've now made 6 separate attempts to re-design this site. Each and every time, I hated the result and killed it before even turning it into a theme. Attempts number 5 and 6 were both made with the YUI CSS and it became clear that that was the way for me to easily do the grid layouts (instead of straight 3 column layouts) in CSS without having to do all the crazy hacks myself.

However, in both of those attempts, as I added all of the information that the pages of this site have, they got cluttered and ugly. Eventually, I grew to despise each in turn. Until this week, when attempt number 7 managed escape velocity from my "ugly filter" and is actually being turned into a Wordpress theme for real use on this site.

It's a slightly wider version (950px wide) and moves some things around. Much of the palette is the same set of blues I've been working with for a while here, which keeps the branding and "feel" the same. I also went for several distinct layouts, with different approaches for specific posts vs the index and other post listings.

I'm also wrapping most of the ads (particularly the Adsense ones) in code which will hide them from regular visitors. Something like 80% of visitors only view one page and then leave. Most of the time, those users searched for something, hit the page and then move on to other results for their search. They actually are the ones who are *interested* in the Adsense ads as they're looking for related resources somewhere else. So, I'll be setting a threshold (say 3 pages), where, once you've seen that many pages (according to your cookies), the ads shut off.

That's a good thing for those of you regulars who visit often. You won't have to be bothered by the ads, and I can keep funding my retirement.

The theme is coming together behind the scenes over the next couple of days. If you want to watch that process happen, you can tack "?preview_theme=WyniaOrg4" onto the end of any Wordpress URL on the site and you'll see how it looks in the new theme. As of right now, there's just the basic index page functioning (and even that not nearly done). I'm still looking to dress the header up a bit better and am not satisfied with the font settings, but am finally confident that this one will see the light of day.

If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try, try, try, try again.

Now that I've gotten this Wordpress installation straightened out and errors removed, I'm looking at doing a new theme/redesign (yes, starting again). I didn't really like my last attempt and would really like something I can stare at for a while before needing it re-done.

I also would like to finally make my theme standards-compliant. At various times, I've looked at many of the starting points that are out there for CSS-based layouts. Unfortunately, they all pretty much consist of variations on 1, 2 and 3 column layouts.

That causes a problem because what I'm looking to do is much more of a magazine-style grid, especially for a new front page. I want areas for featured posts, recent posts, subscription information, etc. And, when I just shove them into left or right columns like I'm doing now, I'm not really happy with the result. The kinds of grids that the linked article uses are way more complicated than the samples to do with CSS.

While I'm perfectly capable of getting it to work eventually, I'm not interested in spending 5 times as long to build the thing with pure CSS as it would take to hack it together the impure way.

I was lamenting this overall situation to someone a few days ago and they suggested I take a look at the YUI grid CSS setup. I messed with their grid builder a bit and read through the documentation and I definitely think that YUI grids are a really slick way to build those more complicated layouts using CSS. The elements are nestable (one of my biggest pet peeves with most CSS layouts), stackable and otherwise provide most of the necessary controls to build the more complicated grids.

I'm thinking if I can get a grid working that I like, then apply color and design to that grid, I can make future changes to just that color and design bit, to freshen things up instead of starting from scratch the next time. Having it all laied on out on a bare grid would probably work better for working with a designer as well. Lots of the problems the last time I did that came from layouts that just wouldn't work with all of the elements on this site.

It'll still have to wait until next week or later due to how much crap is going on this week, but for the first time in a long time, I'm confident that what I want to see done with this site can be done *easily* with CSS.

If you can read this, you're looking at the new Wordpress setup. I'm sure there's some stuff that I'll have to tweak, but it's certainly going to be less irritating than the stuff that led to this slash-n-burn solution. Let me know if you see strange behavior.