Torley Lives

I had to smile when I saw their unofficial slogan, "aggregation without the aggravation" on Guy Kawasaki's blog. A little over a month later, I've been hand-picked for the popurls-like virtual.alltop.com alongside numerous other collections of choice sites, like the Official Second Life Blog (DISCLAIMER: I write for them too). This is quite an honor, considering (1) Kawasaki is one of my heroes, (2) I'm a rabid fan of aggregators (efficiency!), and (3) the people behind the site seem really nice (#3 is the most important). I got a most welcome email from Kathryn Henkens (who runs it along with Will and Guy), and I was like "YAYZERAMA!"

Thanks, I feel really good, but I'm having a hard time finding a badge that suits my modesty! (I'll make some sidebar space too…)

But suddenly, I find myself becoming more self-critical whilst questioning the classification of certain other sites: e.g., Gabes Virtual World has a nice set of crayons, but has more to do with virtualization than 3D spaces on the Internet. And those cute Club Penguin guys need a better title than "What's New". I am sure like contents of boxes, this will settle over time. Some of my personal faves have yet to be included, too.

But suddenly (2x), I feel under pressure to write meaningful posts which are useful to you. Good pressure, since I was already doing that, and there's gonna be more. ("Quality in quantity," that's what I say!) Coming up, then:

• What do you want me to blog about?

I also guarantee:

     » Read more…

I'm still having the tough issue of Windows Live Writer's "Web Layout" mode not working on this blog, which is darn weird because it was functioning fine in weeks before. What's even more wack is it's not working for the official Second Life blog either (!), and that's hosted by WordPress.com. In any case, I'm mid-email-correspondence with the awesome Joe Cheng (WLW dev), so let's see what happens.

My appreciation thus far for the responses to the quick-'n'-dirty poll I put up, it's 18 to 12 right now with 60% in favor of changing my blog theme. Since it's not an overwhelming lead, I'm still taking action — cleaning up some theme inconsistencies (gr, does Internet Explorer 7 and even 8 render like crap… layouts that appear fine in Firefox, Opera, and Safari look wrong in IE).

I took a long hard look at my blog widgets, and reorganized them for simplicity. In a funny twist of minimalism, I notice a lot of blogs show 5-10 recent comments, but I'm just showing the 1 newest one for now. Let's see how that goes. These are experiments and if they fail, I can keep adapting. I also merged my various creative activities into a single "Stuff you enjoy" widget on the left.

Last night, I must've looked at 100s of WordPress themes. Not a single clear winner stands out to me above Tiga, so I'm somewhat surprised. But I do like Sandbox's possibilities — if only I had more time & desire to customize. I've been getting design inspiration from some of my fave places like Zen Habits (which uses a custom theme, apparently… wonder who the designer is? I'm gonna ask).

I encountered problems post WP-2.5 upgrade with Popularity Contest and aLinks plugins: "fatal error". Thanks to Blogvaria, the former is solved. The latter is not and alinks.org is down, so this is a loose end.

I removed the video tutorials "sticky post" for now; it may be back at the top if things go well, as it was getting a fair amount of traffic and making it easy for people to watch my latest vidtuts. (There's also the question of whether I should only have vidtuts on my YouTube channel from now on or if the playlist I have on the main channel page is focus enough, then I can keep posting random fun…)

I just want to keep making awesome stuff for you to enjoy!

Let me know of any specific requests & recommendations. My wife found a pic of what my blog looked like in 2006, and we've come a long way. Today, a snapshot for posterity, as things will keep changing.

Change is in the air, as they say — I'm currently encountering a frustrating problem with Windows Live Writer not parsing my blog's style correctly, and as a result, WYSIWYG-ish editing isn't working right. Yet I've found it to work when I switch my blog theme to something else, oddly enough. Ugh. I've asked for help.

Nevertheless, never one to stay still, I upgraded to WordPress 2.5 today, and I've been thinking of changing my blog's theme. Tiga (the current one which you see, which I've modded) has served me well, but feels a little crufty… maybe it's just sheer age, maybe it's because I think things could look 'n' feel better for you.

So, whaddaya think? It's important I ask you without suddenly switching things over. Take the poll!

And let me know any further details in the comments — specific recommendations for WordPress blog themes are appreciated. Or even if you don't think I should change the whole theme, suggestions for better readability + usability (while keeping my watermelonishness in mind) are appreciated. THANXIES!

Hola, just wanted to share that it's now easier to keep up with the discussion flow on various blog posts here — I added the Subscribe to Comments plugin, meaning that when you make a comment on Torley Lives, you can check a box labeled:

Notify me of followup comments via email

Ah, I love that word "followup". Let me know how it works for you!