I’d like to announce a new group blog, called The Philosophers’ Cocoon! I’m especially pleased to do so, since I’m one of the contributors. As the Mission Statement of the blog states, it is primarily “by and for” early-career philosophers, and dealing with topics like publishing, grad school, the job market and academia more generally. The founding member is Marcus Arvan, and we’ve already got a nice group of contributors. I’ve just posted my first contribution to the blog, on Editing a Book — effectively a “behind the scenes” account of how my volume Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics, came to be, plus some general guidelines about the editing process.

I quite like the idea and the mission statement, and I believe that the blog will be a success. I may repost some material from my own blog there, but I will especially make use of this new venue to post exclusively philosophy-related material, given that this blog deals with my interests much more generally. This doesn’t mean that I’ll stop posting about philosophy on this blog though!

Anyway, go ahead and have a look, leave a comment, and subscribe to The Philosophers’ Cocoon!

I’ve just made a final decision to integrate my general website into the WordPress blog. There are some downsides to this, but it looks like things should work out just fine. The main issue that I still have is to find a way to get dynamic updates from my Gallery 3 installation, with all my photography. Incidentally, I’ve finally updated the look of the Gallery, I wanted to go for something darker than the default theme. Still a lot of work to do with the tags and categorization there, I’ll get to it eventually. There are some rudimentary WordPress plugins for this, but they are mostly beta, and mostly broken… Well, I may just add a few shots manually and link to the gallery, we’ll see.

Anyway, the primary difference is that the content pages that you may have seen on my general webpage are now ‘pages’ on the blog. There are links to these pages both on the very top of the site and on the sidebar to the right, i.e. ‘Elsewhere on TTahko.net’. (I realize that this makes no sense if you’re reading through Google Reader or something, but go check the actual site!) This is not quite ideal, but these links should be obvious enough.

Another difference worth noting is that the blog URL is now the root, i.e. http://www.ttahko.net/ — however, the old blog URL should still work as well, or, more precisely, redirect you to the new URL. All the content is still actually in a subfolder on my server, but WordPress offers handy functionality to change the site URL without physically moving anything except the index.php and the .htaccess, it requires very little tweaking. One thing to note about this is that it’s probably better to point your feed reader to http://ttahko.net/feed/ from now on. The old feed works too though. I’m using FeedBurner to manage the feed now anyway, so it all ends up at http://feeds.feedburner.com/ttahko

So, the old TTahko.net site has now disappeared and the WordPress installation serves as an integrated website. I’m still tweaking things a little bit, so let me know if there’s something strange happening. I do know that the CSS positioning is off on IE7, but it’s a bugger to code for and I’m not sure if I can be bothered to even fix it — you shouldn’t be using such a crappy browser anyway! Besides, this is a ‘feature’ of the PressPlay theme that I’m using as a base for the blog rather than a result of my own coding. It shouldn’t be that difficult to fix really, I could just add a conditional CSS for IE7, but it would still require some work. It seems to look fine on Firefox, newer IE, and Google Chrome at least. Presumably it’s fine on Safari, although I haven’t actually tested this myself. At least I haven’t received any complaints from Mac users.

Oh, how do I know that the positioning is off on IE7?
/start complaint
Well, the default browser at my office computer at the University of Helsinki is IE7, that’s how! (I just used it to see whether the site looks ok, which it didn’t.) The whole Uni IT system is running on antiquated crap, it seems. Recently I had a problem with the online Sole Time Management system that I’m supposed to use to record the hours I’ve worked (which makes no sense), but the system broke when I changed my password for the Uni IT system: it couldn’t handle my 22 character password! (No, that’s not excessive in this day and age.) Of course, I had to figure out this myself, because the system itself gives no indication of this, and the main user or anyone else working in admin seemed to have no idea about the whole issue. What a great idea to allow users to change their password on a general level so that it works on some applications but not on others… Well, now they know, although I suspect that no one has actually fixed this — I had to revert to a shorter password.
/end complaint

I had no luck in the final of the 3 Quarks Daily contest for the best blog post in philosophy, but I was happy just to take part and make it that far. The three winners have been announced and you can see Akeel Bilgrami’s, who judged the final, comments behind the link as well.