Administration

Administrative Note: Website Refresh

/ Christopher Parsons

Photo by Sanja Gjenero

I’ve been testing different ways to present the content of this website for about 9 months now, testing about 50 different themes, hundreds of plugins, and learning more about the loop than I though possible. For some time the iNove theme that I used has caused me a lot of headaches: it is slow, has regularly crashed the publishing functions of my WordPress install, and hadn’t been updated by the developer in years. This last item was particularly annoying, given that these lack of updates have prevented me from taking advantage of many new features in WordPress 3.0.

After spending (literally) countless hours trying to get iNove to work and find an alternate theme, I finally decided to take the plunge on switching themes on Sunday evening. The site came down for about twenty hours (two more than initially scheduled) and has since come back. I’m using the TwentyTen theme as the underbelly of the site, with many of the CSS changes courtesy of the TwentyTen – Blogging Inside Edition child theme. The changes in the child theme have been supplemented with my own modifications. I want to quickly catalogue what I did, in case there are features that someone else wants to incorporate some of these changes into their own TwentyTen installation.

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New RSS feed, ‘Worth Reading’

/ Christopher Parsons / 2 Comments

Like most people who are active online, I read a lot off the web, and there isn’t any way for me to analyze and critique much of what I’m reading on this site; I touch on items here and there, but I can’t be systematic on many topics. For some time I’ve used delicious to tag articles, and all of those tags are available to anyone who’s interested in using them to comb through my bookmarks. This said, it was recently pointed out that I have a foolish number of tags (they’re there so that *I* can cull articles based on tag-based query) which makes navigating my delicious stream…unpleasant.

Given my own temporal limitations and the critique of my tagging system, I’ve added an RSS feed titled ‘Worth Reading‘ to the right-hand side of the site, over beside the blogroll. The feed just follows the ‘ttt‘ tag from my delicious stream (ttt=Technology, Thoughts, and Trinkets) and will provide subscribers with articles, blog posts, news pieces, and academic papers that relate to topics often written about here (i.e. security, copyright, deep packet inspection, p2p, social networking, etc) as well as articles on the academy that are useful and/or thought provoking. I’m not digging through my archive to identify items for this feed – time constraints and sanity preclude this – but will be tagging anything relevant to this space so it’ll show up in the RSS.

Hope it’s useful and/or interesting. Feedback is always welcome!

Administrative Note: Away for a While

/ Christopher Parsons / 1 Comment

gonefishingI’m off to Ontario to attend the Summer Surveillance Studies Workshop at Queen’s University for the next little while, so there will be far fewer posts than I’ve been producing of late. There is a good one thinking about conceptualization of privacy that’ll be posted in my absence while I’m away, which sees me continuing to reflect on the challenges of developing privacy theories against the ‘pragmatic realities’ of contemporary virtualized life. I hope you enjoy it.

Be back a while!

The First Post – Embarking on a New Voyage

/ Christopher Parsons

sails
This blog is part of a series of projects that I’m currently embarking on. My thesis topic is ensuring that a great deal of my research is in the philosophy of technology, but many of my sources for it are explicitly grounded in the empirical domain. While technical abstraction is fine and good, being a generalist about technology when writing philosophy is a poor second to writing about technology generally while having an understanding of its inner workings.

It is in this light that I recently purchased a two-year contract with Dreamhost so that I could learn about how to create and work in a full-fledged wiki, use wordpress, and become familiar with how cascading style sheets and other elements of web design operated. The learning curb is (significantly!) uphill, but I’m confident that the challenges will provoke me to learn, rather than dissuade me.

As noted in the ‘About’ section, this blog is ‘semi-personal’. This means that, while I will be writing about events, objects, and theories that matter to me, I will not be writing about events in my daily life. This isn’t to prevent any potential readers from knowing about who I am, but to create a divide between the strictly personal, and not-so-personal, aspects of my life.

I will be updating this blog on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. This blog is powered by WordPress and is using the Ocadia theme without any modifications.