About this site's lack of design: Yes, it's supposed to look this way — I'm helping create a new sandbox theme for WordPress (see it on GitHub).

Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Suffering from chronic idiocy since 1977

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Pardon Our Dust

If you’re vis­it­ing this site for the first time, and are see­ing the default Word­Press theme (aka Kubrick), please rest assured that a cus­tom designed theme is hid­ing some­where within the Word­Press installation–WordPress is just hav­ing a bit of a tantrum lately, and has decided to keep revert­ing back to the default shortly after I reset the cus­tom theme in the admin.

Those of you who are return vis­i­tors are hope­fully miss­ing the usual orange and brown good­ness that has graced these pages for almost 2 years.

Host­ing Woes

For the last few weeks, my home­page hasn’t been load­ing at all — Dreamhost didn’t seem to think it was a prob­lem on their end (though I’d made no changes to the site between it work­ing and ceas­ing to work). After going around in cir­cles with them for too long, I uploaded a fresh install of Word­Press, moved my plu­g­ins and theme direc­to­ries, changed a few hard-coded absolute URLs, and things were work­ing again. For about 5 minutes.

Arti­fi­cial Intelligence?

Per­haps my blog­ging soft­ware is try­ing to tell me some­thing? I’ve planned a redesign for well over a year, but other endeav­ors have taken pri­or­ity (e.g. Side­bar Cre­ative, Web­graph, Rounders, var­i­ous client/consulting work, pre­sen­ta­tions, work­shops and toy­ing with things like Virb). I’ve also been seri­ously think­ing about hit­ting the redesign over the last month or so–is Word­Press now smart enough to read my mind? Or is my soon-to-be-replaced theme get­ting jeal­ous? It’s creepy from where I’m sitting…

Sep­a­rat­ing Con­tent From Presentation

Okay, so it’s not the use for which that phrase is intended, but in a way, it’s inter­est­ing to see my con­tent with­out its cus­tom skin. I’ve been read­ing through many of the arti­cles I’ve writ­ten, and pay­ing more atten­tion to the text. Per­haps this is a nor­mal issue with design­ers try­ing to objec­tively read their own con­tent while get­ting dis­tracted by their own designs–if you haven’t tried it, give it a shot some­time; it may help expose issues with your design, or your con­tent, or at the very least allow you a fresh per­spec­tive on your own writing.

This item was posted by Dan Rubin on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008.

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9 comments on “Pardon Our Dust”

  1. Posted by kent on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008.

    I have had the same prob­lem with the theme reset­ting itself. I don’t know what is caus­ing it, but one way to get around it is to rename your cus­tom theme “default”…

  2. Posted by Stephen Collins on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008.

    I always have that prob­lem with WP. Have no idea why.

    But I’m just happy to not have to see “Pink for Octo­ber’ when I tab through my bookmarks.

  3. Posted by Luke Dorny on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008.

    What the…!?

  4. Posted by Natalie Jost on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008.

    Hey, I noticed that with the new WP ver­sion. I’m not sure what the bug is, but if you rename your main tem­plate “default” it fixes the prob­lem. It’s annoy­ing, I know, drove me crazy for days until some­one sug­gested this tip.

  5. Posted by Dan Rubin on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008.

    @kent & @Natalie: I read that yes­ter­day (as well as the wp-mobile plu­gin pos­si­bly being the cause, which isn’t the case for me), but I’ve been hop­ing to find a bet­ter way :/ Not that it’s a big deal to change, since I only have a few absolute URLs and paths, but still…

    Dear Word­Press, please fix this or tell us how, thanks :)

  6. Posted by Matthew Oliphant on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008.

    Hey, at least you’re blog­ging again.

  7. Posted by Matt Robin on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008.

    You kept some orange! I like that.… ;)

    Actu­ally, it’s inter­est­ing to me that you’re doing a redesign, you’ve had some prob­lems with your WP-running on Dreamhost…and that sort of thing, because I’m also in the process of a redesign for my site at the moment, it is also hosted on Dreamhost, and I was start­ing to run into a bunch of prob­lems with my CMS (okay, not WP, but Textpattern)…and well, to cut a long story short — I’m now learn­ing about Expres­sion Engine with a view for using that as my new CMS.…with a new design.…sometime…(probably won’t have orange in it).

    I’m sure you’ll have your new design up before mine breaks cover, and yours will rock of course. I’m look­ing for­ward to it Dan! :)

  8. Posted by Nate Klaiber on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008.

    Can I have my design back now? he.

    As oth­ers have said…at least there is still orange.

  9. Posted by root on Sunday, June 15th, 2008.

    I have never under­stood Matt’s fetish for Kubrick. In these com­ments alone are half a dozen top design­ers whose work is being screwed up by a fault first iden­ti­fied over 3 years ago. Do you think WP cares? No way.