I started my website in 2003. At the time it was hosted by the University of Michigan, where I was a graduate student. They gave all students some space for a personal website. It was really great, though it did come with some limitations, like no php or cgi allowed. I managed to kludge some server side includes and javascript together to get a fairly decent food website. I also had some other stuff on my site like some academic […] (Read more)

Recently I was working on a project where a client wanted a list of items to be displayed over multiple columns, and requested that the columns be balanced (as balanced as possible). It didn’t take me too long to figure out how to do this for 3 columns, but I knew that there was a more general solution, which did take me a little time to figure out. I am sharing my solution here for my future reference. Perhaps some […] (Read more)

The first question on reader’s mind must be — why use LaTeX to blog? Well, I have a pretty specific instance in mind, but I can imagine that others might be interested as well. This fall I am teaching a course on computational corpus linguistics at CU Boulder. I like to have some materials online for the students, such as the syllabus, course notes, etc. I thought about setting up a simple webpage, but then I decided instead to use […] (Read more)

I was recently debating with my friend Danny how people navigate sites, especially blogs. As the author of 3 plugins designed to enhance site navigation (collapsing archives, categories, and pages), I of course had my opinions, but what is really compelling is data. So I finally decided to modify my links on my site a bit in order to figure out more exactly how people are navigating my site. There are several different ways in which people can navigate to […] (Read more)

As I mentioned a few months back, wordpress 2.8 has a completely new widget API, which means that I had to do quite a bit of work to get my widgetized plugins ready for 2.8. Fortunately, the new API is much better than the old style. I won’t guarantee that they are without bugs, which is why I am calling them beta. But they should all work with the defaults at any rate. They also have some new features, including […] (Read more)