Redesign!

The last time I made any significant change to the design of this blog was when I moved it from being a guest on editthispage.com to my own domain. That was in 2005, and at the time, I had to ensure that the blog would be readable by my Mom on her 800×600 screen. So I took a then-new WordPress theme and adapted it to my needs by putting it onto a piece of wood and banging a few nails through it.

My original design constraints became irrelevant more than five years ago, but every time I thought about changing the appearance of the blog, I thought about the mass of CSS and PHP I’d have to deal with and put the project aside for another day. Or year.

This week, though, I started assisting the Webmaster of
the Los Gatos Silver Tongued Cats Toastmasters club in moving our site from FreeToastHost to WordPress (a project not yet complete), and he showed me how easy it was to make changes using modern themes and their associated widgets. So I spent this afternoon updating this blog to use the Weaver theme; the hardest part was figuring out how to get my Google AdSense to display where I wanted it (under the title) at the full width of the page (the answer: put the AdSense code in as a snippet instead of using the header widget).

I’m not sure that I’m finished with the redesign, but it certainly seems more modern (and less tiring to read on a widescreen display). Comments are welcome, of course.

Five Days — That’s Not Too Many!

On Sunday, I asked for help in identifying a story I’d read many years ago. I pointed to the posting from Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

This morning, a friend from shul (who happens to be a Googler) answered my Google+ post, asking if this review might be of the story I was looking for. It was, and a quick search found the first few pages on Google Books.

I wanted to read the whole story, and I thought I’d probably be able to find Matheson’s book in a local library, but I was still curious where I’d originally read the story. I was pretty sure that I’d read it in an anthology, not a single-author collection, so I went to the Contento Index and looked for “The Creeping Terror”. I discovered two interesting things there:

  • The story was also called “A Touch of Grapefruit”
  • It had been anthologized under that name in Star Science Fiction 5

Both of those facts seemed awfully familiar. I got up from the computer, went to the bookshelves, and found my copy of Star Science Fiction 5. And “A Touch of Grapefruit” was right there on page 35.

Yes. I’d been searching for years for a story which was sitting on my own bookshelves.

At least I got to read the end of the story today!