Two small design changes this morning:

1. Single-post pages now have a brain icon on them that links you back to the index. The back button isn’t as nice as I thought for this, and it helps with the sense of where you are in the site. Jill’s usability suggestion, my implementation. An alternate option is “Home” or similar text, but I thought it looked cluttered. Thoughts? Maybe a small QR code?
2. If you don’t have a Gravatar your email is now hashed into an eight-bit retro icon to represent you visually in the conversation system.

Some possible future directions. Thoughts obviously welcome:

1. Move the conversation system to Disqus.
2. Hack the Twitter widget to stop saying “mentalpolyphony” so goddamn much.
3. Move the theme to an open repository on github.
4. MPF on iOS?

Previously on MPF we wondered at Amanda Knox’s conviction. Now she’s free. Causal. My sources tell me a book deal is already in the works.

I have wrestled with the WordPress beast and won! Welcome to the latest update! Anyone wanna bet five bucks they update again soon?

I’ve played with the theme to remove the blog title and the quote, which I was using to collect random things ephemerally. I am thinking of resurrecting our twitter feed (@mentalpolyphony) for text ephemera in future, and I’ve added a widget for it over on the sidebar. I think this is a way better way to do quotes, partly because they now get archived and partly because they’re now open for easy sharing and comment.

The blog title is already all over your browser, so putting it on the pages is superfluous. For example, I’m using Firefox right now and “MentalPolyphonics” appears four times: on the window title bar, the tab title bar, the address bar for the tab, and on the link on the bookmark bar. A fifth time, on the page itself, would be a (bigger) waste of space.

I made this observation years ago but lost track of it over the revisions. The one (?) tradeoff is that since the title is a link, there’s no single-click back from a post to the homepage, apart from the browser’s back button, and so viewers arriving from the great wild spaces of the ‘net will have to manipulate the address bar to get to the index. Our usage stats indicate that wildlings don’t typically visit the index anyway, so no big deal.

Should we be thinking about (further) Facebook integration? We can turn our comment system over to them, for example. I would rather not, but what do you guys think?

Sunday is MPF’s five-year anniversary. We’re now half-way through our lease on the domain

I’ve gone from accounting school to film school and from Vancouver to (almost) Toronto in that time.

This hiatus we’re evidently on right now is a result of Summer having lots to entice us all away from our computers. I’m on-set until the end of the month and then back in Victoria for a few days before moving to Toronto (and hopefully one of the films I keep applying to crew out there).

Anyway, it’s been an interesting five. The would-be accountant and the would-be filmmaker feel the same to me, but in some ways are a continent apart. This blog affected that movement in some interesting ways.

Thank you all.

Our host is fighting with its host, so we have to move servers. BRB.

I just destroyed the blog: “rm -r”, without thought. If you have a backup of the theme somewhere let me know. I don’t know if I have one because of my messy drives

@Jared: We need to re-install all the plugins we want. Let’s take a moment to rethink the whole design. I think, for better or worse, the old one is extinct. I also deleted all uploaded content, including images.

The bright side is that the server is now a lot cleaner.

Jared hax0r’d the blizzog so that if you scroll down on the main page it’ll keep bringing in new posts automatically: our index is now infinitely* long.

It’s pretty awesome. We can now start phasing out the next/previous page buttons.

* Not really, we haven’t written an infinite amount.

If you click through to our posts now, between the body and the comments section, I’ve included QR-links on the pages back to themselves. The idea, outlined in this Boing, is that if you want to read an article on-the-go, you can just QR it to your phone straight from the screen.

We’ll be working on incorporating them better into the style (I am concerned there is too much scrolling between content and comments) and playing more with content (they are ridiculously easy to generate thanks to Google), but the experiment has begun! I’m probably going to put them into videos and games in future.

For gigzamples here’s a secret message for you to uncover:

Today is international wear purple to support gay peeps day, so I’ve re-done the links.

Today is our fourth blogday! Mazel tov!