Anyways, I’ve finally implemented the new, extremely minimalist design everywhere. The plugin Theme Switch helped a bunch, because it allowed me to preview what I was working on without the general public seeing it. WordPress itself was a pain though, because I’m used to coding by hand and not using any kind of framework to generate HTML. I ended up doing some pretty silly things. For example, I first started by trying to get WordPress to simply call my custom templating files for the rest of the site. Following the logic of my system I did things like:

$title = wp_title();
//...
require('head.php'); //My custom templating system


Whenever I loaded the page there was a mysterious “Nomulous Blog” at the very top of my HTML source. This confused me at first, but I soon realized that (not having been designed to be processed, only displayed) the wp_title() function printed a value instead of returning one.

In the end I just went to my home page, copied most of the source, and modified the default WordPress theme to use that instead. Aha!

The gradually less amazing xkcd.com has been “redesigned” in order to commemorate the shutting down of Yahoo’s free webhosting, GeoCities. It’s so perfectly ugly, even the HTML tags in the raw source are all capitalized! Genius. As for GeoCities, so long, farewell, and good riddance.

font-family: "HelveticaNeue-Light", "Helvetica Neue Light", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
font-weight: 300;


Some browsers (IE + the older ones) use fonts based on their family name and their style, that is “Helvetica Neue Light”. Others use the PostScript name, under the Adobe spec, e.g. “HelveticaNeue-Light”. Others still, such as the latest versions of Safari, Firefox, and Chrome, conform to the W3C specification when it comes to fonts and their styles, and take only the Family Name. The W3C dictates that you must use other CSS directives to get “light” or “bold” fonts. In this case the “Helvetica Neue”, along with the “font-weight: 300;”, will display Helvetica Neue Light to the user.

Arial is included for the sake of the poor Windows users out there, who have to use the font Microsoft put on their computer because they were to cheap to pay for Helvetica, despite it being one of the oldest and most widely used fonts in the world. As any typography nerd would know, Arial was a total rip off of Helvetica and should never be used.

There you have it. Mac users get to look at Helvetica Neue Light, while Windows users still get crappy old Arial.

I also got a nice email from Softpedia telling me they’ve added ACLr8 to their database, and that they’ve deemed it “100% clean” and all that. It was nice to hear. ‘Cause I was pretty sure I put a virus in there somewhere.