MarcFriedenberg.com

I’m afraid it’s true: I’m rebooting the site. Everything you’ve come to love will still be here, and there will even be more. It’s just going to be reorganized, and with a new look. You can already see the new theme, and the content changes will be coming over the next few days.

This was my first foray into WordPress theme development. Basically, I modified the default “Kubrick” theme so that it is closely (almost identically) modeled on the clean design of softwarefreedom.org. After a bit more experimentation, I plan on making the theme available for public use.

Today has been a joyous mixture of pre-ordering a Wii, reading, working on the graded memo, and updating this site. I’ve got a contract due on Wednesday and I’m trying to work on outlines, starting with Crim.

In other news, it’s a sad day for Philly sports. Donovan is out for the season (again) and it looks like the Phils won’t be picking up Soriano. The Sixers and Flyers continue to remain bad. Sometimes the consistency is all you need.

Since I last wrote, I moved out of State College and spent a week in Emerald Isle, NC with Becky and her family. I’ve been home for a few days now, packing and getting ready for the trip. We’re leaving on Sunday, and spending our first night in Indianapolis. We’ll be posting photos and I plan on blogging as much of the journey as possible, if not for your interest then at least for mine.

For your viewing pleasure, I’ve posted my Masters thesis on my Research page. I’ve also made PDF copies of all of my Daily Collegian articles.

This site may experience a bit of downtime in the coming days. My old Web hosting provider is going out of business, so I have to migrate. Catch you on the other side.

UPDATE: Looks like everything went well.

I’ve decided to focus this blog just a little bit more. At least until law school starts, I’ll only use this space to comment on what’s going on in my life, for the benefit of those poor souls who can’t talk to me in person. So, if I come across a cool link or some such thing, I’ll instead be posting it on my del.icio.us page (there’s also an RSS feed of this available). If some analysis of mine takes more than a sentence, though (and it rarely does,) it’ll appear here.

Is it clear that most of this site is non-blog content? All the really important links from an e-portfolio perspective (activities, articles, courses, research, etc.) are on the right, but I’m afraid that certain VIP visitors might be missing this information and seeing this site only as a fairly weak blog. I want to know if the areas of the site that interest me the most are getting an appropriate amount of space in the display, and I don’t necessarily want to run experiments to find out. Please drop a line.

I changed my blog theme again, because I wanted to. I made the Martian landscape my header image because it is pretty, and I want to walk on it one day, and my name derives from the planet.

A holiday treat for you: I’ve updated the theme of this site.

Eat something!

I’m debating with myself how much of this site I should host myself versus host at other sites that “specialize” in a particular type of content. Currently I’ve got my Schedule posted on LionSchedules, my Wishlist posted on Amazon, a Facebook profile on, well, thefacebook, and Links on del.icio.us. I even host my Photo Gallery with Gallery, rather than a custom tool I created earlier. Last but not least, I’m using WordPress to power this entire site, rather than the handcoding I was doing before.

The benefits of using these other sites/tools are many. First and foremost, I don’t have to create or maintain any homegrown applications. The downside, though, is that I don’t have as much of an opportunity to flex my PHP/mySQL muscle, which is potentially pretty important for what is ultimately an e-portfolio. That being said, it does seem redundant to continually “roll my own” when more complete tools already exist. Perhaps potential employers might even appreciate the fact that I’ve been able to integrate a number of tools and have efficiently created a site in a few weeks that would otherwise have taken months or more.

Still, I have given up a little bit of control, and I never like doing that.

Making this page validate took, quite literally, forever.