If you’ve been experiencing strange behaviour at my website in the last week or so, these issues should now be fixed (to refresh, use ctrl + F5 in Windows; Apple + R or command + R in Mac/Apple; F5 in Linux). There were three problems going on, and one caused me not to notice the issue until it was pointed out to me. Firstly, there was an update to the WordPress theme I use — I still haven’t re-checked all the functionality, so let me know if there’s any strangeness. Secondly, the Garmin Connect plugin that I had been using had updated itself to the latest version, which I know to be broken. Finally, after I thought I’d fixed all this, it emerged that the cache plugin that I’m using messed up some of the theme updates. Things were showing up fine for me in Chrome straight from the cache, but the site was (presumably) broken for other browsers. Anyway, I’ve now tested basic functionality with Chrome, IE 10, and Waterfox; everything seems to be ok. I’m just going to give up with the W3 Total Cache plugin that I’ve been using. While it does seem to make the site a bit faster, it also clogs up my server with tens of thousands of files (which JustHost does not like). Hopefully things will still run somewhat smoothly, as I’ve taken down some of the heavier elements anyway.

I have had some problems with this heavy theme in the past and I’m starting to consider a change. It looks good and has some neat functionality, but also some tricky issues that required a lot of tweaking. Some aspects (like way too large vertically aligned featured blog images) are not really fixable without breaking the theme elsewhere, so I just gave up with those. I’m now thinking of a possible ‘minimal’ design which would still have the functionality that I want (like photo gallery and some nice slideshow features etc. for blog images). Alas, I don’t have time to look into the options now (but I welcome suggestion; I’m willing to pay for the theme).

In other words, better update that Curriculum Vitae, which is exactly what I have done. With the impending doom of the daunting US job market, I bet that many hopeful candidates are trying to think of ways to bulk up the CV. Well, I’ve decided to give the US job market a shot this year, so I needed a fitting CV as well. I’ve experimented with a number of LaTeX templates for CVs, such as moderncv and europecv. While I like something about all of the templates I’ve tried, none of them were really what I was looking for. After being adviced to switch to a more conventional formatting for the US market, I’ve decided to go the way of a very plain but neat and functional look — very similar to CVs you may be familiar with from NYU graduates… The pdf version is here. Any feedback is welcome, although I’m, fairly happy with it as it stands. I may have missed some bugs though, so feel free to let me know if you spot something strange. I’ll keep the rather more liberal formatting on the html version on my webpage, I need to assert some personality after all!

I should also take the opportunity to point any interested readers to the very helpful job market related posts at The Philosophers’ Cocoon. See the summary post in particular. New posts on related matters will surely keep coming, and I will probably post there about my own experiences about the US job market.

As you will have noticed if you’ve visited my site in the last couple of days, I’ve adopted a new WordPress theme and fiddled around with the content as well. The primary reason for this are the performance issues that my previous theme was causing — I should’ve really looked into it a lot sooner. Anyway, things are hopefully running smoother now, although I’ve got several things to sort out still.

The theme in use now is called Sentence, by Kriesi. It’s a premium theme, i.e. I paid for it. The main advantages of this are that the theme is thoroughly documented and supported, gets frequent updates, and is in general better optimized (for instance, it’s responsive to mobile devices by scaling down the resolution, do try it out on your phone or tabloid!). Having said that, this guy Kriesi is obviously not a native English speaker, and I’ve had to hunt down some typos in the PHP files, as well as fix obvious bugs… The widgets require a some more work too, and there are a couple of performance bottle necks that I might try to sort out eventually. Anyway, any feedback on the functionality and performance of the website and blog are much appreciated.

Couple of things worth noting. Firstly, the FeedBurner RSS feed for the blog is still active, it’s here. It looks like I scared some subscribers away by briefly making the feed ‘summary only’ when browsing through the various options with the new theme. Not to worry: I plan to keep the full content visible in the feed, and it should work as before now. I also discovered a handy little thing that shows the number of current subscribes to the public, check it out:

While I’m advertising FeedBurner feeds, recall that I also have one for my Garmin Connect activities (with detailed descriptions of my runs, including maps). There’s also one for my PhilPapers RSS feed, where you can mainly stay up to date about my publications.

Secondly, a nice feature of this new theme are portfolios. I’ve wanted to find a way to feature my photography ever since I integrated my blog and my website, and the portfolios seem to be a good way of doing it. There are already some of my favourite shots up on the Photography page (and also a link to my full gallery, which I’m hosting on this same server). I will keep the content of the portfolio down to a small number of my best and favourite photos though, instead of clogging it up — check back later for new additions while I’m going through my catalogue. Note also the possibility of ‘liking’ individual shots in the gallery: basically you can click through to the full image from the portfolio link for a nice feature page with the photo and a description, and you can add comments, ‘like’, or tweet about any individual photo.

Well, that’s the bulk of it, but like I said, there will be some further improvements coming, and the site is very much still looking for its final appearance (among other things, I plan on tweaking my CV and research pages), and there are some silly features in this theme that I need to fix (especially concerning featured images of a blog post). Any feedback on this is welcome, so take your time, browse around, and leave a comment or drop me a message.

The blog/website has a temporary look as I try to get into the bottom of serious the performance issues caused by the WordPress theme I was using (PressPlay). So, for a while, expect some quirky behaviour and broken bits, as well as ugliness. I’ve had a much too long love-hate relationship with the previous theme and I’ve been hoping for an upgrade to it, but the developers seem to have abandoned it altogether as their own website is dead. Obviously I had customised the theme quite a bit as well, so I’ve got a lot of work to do to make the blog pretty. I’m on the lookout for a more functional theme, but this temporary one (Eos) that I once considered adopting will do in the meanwhile. Anyway, all the content is still here, but one thing I need to figure out is how to make the actual blog posts more visible (since I’ve changed the starting page to my ‘About’ section).

I used Pingdom to test the performance of the site and to figure out what was going wrong. It turned out to be an excellent tool.

Stay tuned for updates…

If you’ve been following this blog lately, you’ve seen a steady stream of beer reviews. I know that some people like them, and I certainly like reviewing beers, but I’m faced with a problem… I like to drink beer. I like to drink beer quite often (yes yes, responsibly, rarely very much at any one occasion). I like to drink different kinds of beer, the more variety, the better. Finally, I’m a completist in that I’d like to sample all the different kinds of beers — especially from breweries I like — and I’d like to review and catalogue them all. I’ve been sampling beers for a long time, but only recently started these reviews (and hence the cataloguing).

So, what’s the problem, exactly? Well, my dear readers, I don’t want to clog your blog feed with beer reviews, as I know that many of you probably aren’t so interested in that aspect of the blog. What to do? Well, I could just do fewer reviews, perhaps only review the really special, rarer beers that I try. That is in fact what I plan to do, BUT: I have also discovered a way to satisfy my completist urges and desire to catalogue, so I’ve registered to BeerAdvocate. It’s one of the two big names in beer reviews out there, the other being RateBeer. I tried the latter first, since they have more beers listed in their database, and more reviews as well, but I discovered that the styling of the site is rather rudimentary, and most of the reviews are less involved as well. Incidentally, neither of the sites offers an RSS feed to your own beer reviews, which is a peculiar flaw. I went through the trouble of creating one anyway with the help of Feed43 and Google’s FeedBurner.

But alas, BeerAdvocate has been going through some changes and after having some periods of complete downtime they’ve now managed to completely disable outside access to users’ beer reviews. If you’re a member of the site, you can find all my reviews here, but unfortunately there is no easy way to make them accessible to the general public at this time. The best way to follow my beer reviews at the moment is my Twitter account, as whenever I review a beer on BeerAdvocate, I can post a link to it on Twitter. But I do hope that they manage to fix the site eventually, and I’ll create an RSS feed as soon as that happens. I can hardly believe that at this day and age they haven’t got an RSS feed to begin with, or Facebook and other social media integration gong on (except for a very simple Twitter button).

So, the upshot is that I’m planning to reduce the number of dedicated beer reviews on this blog, and to focus on beers that I consider to be a little bit special — limited editions, seasonals, rarities, or just beers that I’m particularly impressed by or curious about. I’ll direct my desire to catalogue things to BeerAdvocate, but eventually I hope to have an RSS feed of the reviews as well. I do have some forthcoming reviews on a couple of special brews coming up on the blog though, so there’s no need to despair if you enjoy reading them!