At 1:30am GMT+8 on November 15, 2009, I have the privilege of announcing that Word-Text-Communications in its third edition is now officially complete. It took me two and a half frustrating days of WordPress wrangling, but it was all worth it, now.
After some highly unstable fiddling with the default.css stylesheet, I was finally able to customize the blog to look as unique as an Arras-themed blog could. I achieved this by replacing the standard header-subheader text section with a unique and slightly-bigger static background banner image, which also gave me the slight advantage of being able to use any unwebsafe font I'd like ((The banner uses Futura and Minion Pro, but the thin curly brackets are in Helvetica Neue ultralight.)). At some point earlier yesterday with my frequent Photoshop-playing, I even came up with the new official Word-Text-Communications label logo, which could be written in rich text as {W}. You'll see that logo on the banner, the author sidebar, and the favicon by this site's URL on your browser.
I haven't widget-whored as much as I could, so far, which can only be described as a good thing, but I've successfully attached a C-box shoutbox onto the secondary sidebar. It wasn't an official widget per se, as it was added on by copying the code and pasting it into a text/html widget that was dragged onto the sidebar. So far I've not seen any issues with it. Do let me know if you do, though.
I've also been fairly restrained in overt plugin use, but one key plugin (and a feature I'm very, very glad to have) is WP-footnotes, which allows me to go all House of Leaves on you and post long footnotes, references, and citations. One unfortunate inability of WP-footnotes that I've noticed so far is that it can't do true Danielewski-style footnotes-within-footnotes.
The wallpaper for this blog is a repeating background of my trilby, taken on the iPhone with QuadCamera; it is also similarly used as a background for my Twitter page.
All in all, I'm surprised at the amount of work I've done on this site. It started off looking like every other Arras site in existence (except for the rather hideous interim background color I'd put in that was a mix of orange and brown), but now bleeds its own style and flavor. Mmm, customizability.
And in case you haven't tried it, going to http://amirul.exofire.net actually leads you to a welcome page that links you to four possible sites ((a) Word-Text-Communications | textual intercourse & discourse; (b) Word-Text-Communications | The Cat With The Hat; (c) Word-Text-Communications | Warning: Big-O-Vision and other overly hyphenated words; (d) THAT)). The page itself, a rather nice example of simple black minimalist web design, was hand-crafted by me, too.
[/caption]That page was created on iWeb. The use of Futura leads the page to look a little unstable (I've spotted it out-of-size on a Firefox build, which means I might have to edit and resize), and it's entirely possible that older browsers might just substitute the Futura for something standard like Arial.
All in all I'm pretty delighted with the rollout so far. There's been some OpenID hiccups so far, but nothing that even sparks me as anything more than the most trivial. I'm looking forward to including a Google Wave ((An extremely kind stranger by the name of Adam gave me a Google Wave invite: I do not know how he knows of me, but suffice to say I am a very happy person for it, and while I've not put Wave to any good use yet I really do intend to do so once I get enough of my friends in on the action.)) plugin on this blog somehow, meaning I can share and publish items from Wave directly.
Looks like with this proper blog up at last, I'll finally have a proper home for all the words, texts, and communications I want to share with the world.
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