About This Site

Sun 2011.12.18
by brian hefele

My old blog, brhefele.brainaxle.com was a disorganized mess running on a wonderfully minimal blog platform that I basically had to constantly modify and maintain myself. I decided to tidy things up a bit, make a legible site, and move it to its own domain. At the time of writing this, I don’t have a dedicated tech section, that may change in the future.

This site is being hosted at nearlyfreespeech.net, where it will stay unless I happen to outgrow it. The site runs on WordPress, using a custom-built theme. For WP nerds, the site is (obviously) using multisite. A custom function assigns the current blog a short name after checking its id. This short name is then passed as the class of the current <body>. In this way, the colored elements of each site (borders, background, current header) can differ from site to site. A customized version of wp_get_archives does two things: it truncates long titles in the archives list to the left (otherwise they spill over into content — boxing them out with CSS looks far less tidy), and it checks them against the Hide From Archives setting in WP Hide Post.

As far as writing/management goes, I was briefly using Red Sweater’s MarsEdit to manage this blog, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who is looking for a nice Mac client for WordPress. I was really only using it as an interface to the best text editor to ever exist, however, and am now just using the VimRePress plugin instead. I use Vim’s netrw functionality to remotely access theme files for tweaking. I’ll upload the theme eventually, though it’s not really designed for general use — several things like the individual site names in the header are hard-coded in. Perhaps I’ll fix that before I upload it.