Fungible Convictions

I’m enjoying the processing of screwing up the design. Despite that though, I have to step away for vacation. Tonight I get to take three ferries—did you know that Google Maps will give you directions that include boats? I’m glad someone pointed that out to me, otherwise I’d have been looking to turn left on “North Fry.”

Meanwhile, my workplace is a mess. We’re moving too, to new offices. Boxes are everywhere; unfortunately, there should be more boxes but certain of us haven’t packed everything.

I’m going through another round of education on WordPress and CSS.

Expect ugliness, and then transcendent beauty. Etc.

WordPress, which is the base program for this blog as it is now, issued it’s first brand new version (2.0). And this reset Fungible Convictions’ stylesheet [grumble]. I didn’t quite know how to avoid this, but I’ll be fixing styles.css over the next couple days.

For now, FC looks exactly like every other WordPress blog, plus some random, lonely, unattached PHP.

Alan and I are—well, I am—breaking this site for fun. It looks ugly for a reason. The redesign, which will look nothing like the WordPress template that serves as the basis of the site now, is nearly done. I just have to learn to work the browser compatibility bugs out. It’s a complicated layout, and the CSS is chunky for my taste so far . . . so there’s still a good deal of work left.

But it’s moving forward . . .

UPDATE: The browser bugs are more like cockroaches. My CSS is like sugar to them. I’ve stripped the WordPress template of most color except maroon and white, and that’s the simple design we’ll work with while I build and debug everything else offline.

The summer’s in full swing. It’s hot. It’s uncomfortable. And we here in New England are too used to winter to consider buying air conditioners.

The heat and the pressure of two months of non-stop book-buying, reading, drafting, recruiting, interviewing, and e-mailing with all of you has taught me a lot about how Fungible Convictions will work best. Given that, I’m ceasing all heavy lifting for the rest of the summer as Alan and I reconfigure the site. It’s for the best—I need to stop buying so many damn books! But also my company’s week-long national meeting is in a few weeks, and I’ll be taking a week-long vacation after that.

What I’ve learned in this time, specific to FC, is this: Continue reading

Few things to look for on Fungible Convictions in the near future:

1) Right now our software’s default is to assign new users a password (which they can then change by logging in and going to “My Profile”). This is annoying. We’re working on changing this so folks can pick their own passwords upon registration. You know, like every other site in the world.

2 & 3) We’re thinking of adding two features pages, namely, “Blacklist” and “Hagiography”. The Blacklist will be an accumulation of entities FC readers want absolutely no part of. This was inspired by Andrew Whitacre’s list of annoying commercials, which he taped to the side of his television. Hagiography will be an accumulation of one-paragraph panegyrics of favorite people or things, written in the style of medieval Christian hagiographies. We obviously have no idea if we could pull this off. Your help would be appreciated.

Hope you’ve enjoyed the reviews and poems that have gone up recently. Fungible Convictions will be on a posting break until later this month as we touch up the site. It’s a constant battle when you’re a literary site that uses software developed ostensibly for blogs, but it’s a small price to pay to be able to post writing daily in an accessible, intuitive way.

Once the site upgrades are done, we’ll hit the ground running with a couple great interviews. So link our feed and check back in a week or two!