The Lair

There is a proposal underway for a Blogger Code of Conduct. No, really. Someone actually wants to do this. The phrasing in that code of conduct is camp enough to have come from a local blogging celeb or the astroturfing commune.

The highlowlights:
We take responsibility for our own words and for the comments we allow on our blog: Responsibility for my own words on this blog? Fine. Responsibility for comments? Oh hell no. I may or may not endorse every comment on this blog (I’ve disagreed with a few people via comments on their blog and I’d extend someone the same courtesy here), but responsibility? No. Just no way. I have enough trouble being responsible for my own words and actions, never mind what someone else might choose to type in here.

There is a beautiful definition of unacceptable content there which annoys me more. For example, “knowingly false”. WTF? Blog authors need to become mind readers? Maybe we need a lie detector now.

And there is also the escape chute which says we reserve the right to change these standards at any time. Then why bother? I police (for want of a better word) my blog in my own way. Perhaps I already apply these standards. Why do I need a code of conduct and a badge in that case?

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The taboo quiz via Robhu.

I found it fascinating – sufficiently so to be its own post rather than a mere snippet. The incest question brought out my inner prude but I’m reasonably content with the depiction.

Your Moralising Quotient is: 0.29
Your Interference Factor is: 0.25
Your Universalising Factor is: 0.50

You know, this result highlights a disturbing trend. For once, I’d like to be something a bit more extreme than centrist. Apparently my views are utterly middle of the graph, both in politics and in morals. An unkind soul could even whisper “average” and I’d agree. I’d probably add “undecided” to that list.

The promised swishy large fonts™ theme. I started redesigning the theme for the lair a couple of months ago but real life and work intervened several times inbetween. Rather than let it languish for a few more months, I sorta kicked it out the door. In designer speak, this is called a “live redesign”. I just call it “half baked”. Y’all can find out how much is broken for yourself.

I learnt a few layout tricks since I last had a shot at designing a theme so there may be slightly cleaner code. Although I doubt it – this theme sadly bears the duplicated code chunks and hacks of last-minuteitis. I also learnt a bit more about JavaScript in the interim so I did one of those little shelf/accordion/whatchamacallits to reduce visible page clutter. It’s not perfect, but I think it works across all the browsers that I care to support.

Perhaps most importantly from my perspective, the visible fancy enhancements (and some improvements under the hood) have come at the cost of very few excess kilobytes over the previous theme. My 100kb limit is a purely arbitrary number because most blog index pages are double or triple that size but I like to keep things as quick loading and lightweight as possible. If all that isn’t enough, I’m cautiously optimistic about this theme (specifically, the custom bits) being futureproof for the upcoming Wordpress 2.1 – fingers crossed.

Inspiration and the base for the theme provided by the extremely nice and very hackable plaintxtBlog. Although I lost the widget support, rewrote the layout from scratch using the marvellous Yahoo Grids, removed the theme options and did major surgery on the innards to build this so any breakage is all my fault.