Blessed by the Potato

I figured out how to lay the recipes section out more like how I wanted it. I’m in the process of reformatting and posting my recipes now.

Also note some new links on the right. First up is a Page for guest rants. I already have one submitted by Joce!

Now, note how I put page up there in bold and capitalized? That’s just to clarify that a WordPress Page is a very specific type of page (“page” of course referring to just about any document we pull off the www, including this post; but usually referring to HTML documents). A WordPress Page is a dynamically generated document that exists outside the usual blog chronology, and is thus typically static (but not actually static, since it’s not just raw HTML – the contents are stored in the MySQL database and rendered on the fly).

Confused? Yeah, that’s why it took me so long to work through the WordPress documentation to make the recipes page look (closer to) the way I wanted. If you’re just reading this site, the confusion means very little to you: simply know that there are my posts on the main page here, which you can also find using the search function, categories, or monthly archives, and also some other pages linked separately on the right there that you can only get to on the sidebar links. They tend to be more static.

If you’re using WordPress, you might need to figure a little bit of this out (I know Netbug expressed interest in the concept when the Recipes first started appearing on the sidebar there). I think they’re doing themselves a disservice by choosing to call them Pages (so much confusion with lower-case pages!). I’ve seen some suggested alternative nomenclature, such as calling them a “folio”, “leaf”, “pane”, or “panel”. Personally, I like the first two, and in my head and hand-written scribbles refer to them as folios to try to reduce confusion.

But that’s delving a little too much into the guts of the site.

Next up, I’d like you all to notice that I’ve put up some links relating to the upcoming Canadian Federal Election. I would urge you all to consider the ludicracy of our first-past-the-post system. It encourages “strategic voting” so that you vote for a candidate or party that you don’t think will do the best job, but one that you think has the best chance of defeating one that you really don’t like. It discourages independents & new parties from trying to join the race, allows majority governments to form with only a minority of the popular vote, and vote splitting concerns are the main reason the old, somewhat respectable Progressive Conservatives were forced to merge with the Reform party to give us the new Conservatives (which are a fair bit scarier). There is a petition being created at Fair Vote Canada to encourage the government, no matter which one wins this election, to consider another method of voting. I would encourage you to go sign, and if you come across any other respectable petitions (as I’m sure there has to be more than one group petitioning for this) feel free to send a link my way. Also, write your new MP as soon as this election is over and let them know that you want it to be a priority of the new government (or better yet, write all 4+ candidates in your district before the election and let them know it’s an important issue for you).

Finally, has anyone tried the RSS feed from this site? I decided to give it a whirl when I was visiting my parents (in theory, to give me a feed of your comments while I was away), but I got an error about not having a style sheet for the feed. No idea what that means, as I’m still learning here.