I love maps and this one looks like a beauty.
{{ “B000MGVFWY” | amazon_mediumleft_image }} I first read The Fellowship of the Ring in about 1974 or 1975. My father, who traveled for work, brought home a copy of The Hobbit which he had picked up in an airport but didn’t like. I devored it and then went in search for more by J. R. R. Tolkien. The entire Lord of the Rings series has long been one of my favorites. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read these books. My copy of The Fellowship was broken in two with pages falling out until Sibylle mended it for me.
The movies are an entirely different telling of the story. One that I enjoy very much. I have fallen into the habit of watching all three extended movie versions somewhere during the Christmas break. This year I watches all three in one marathon day. Rereading the Tolkien books so soon after watching the movies I can see where Peter Jackson and company altered the story to fit their needs. I know many Tolkien purists bristle at these changes, but I find the movies enjoyable and well done. Yes, they dramatically altered the story. But who’s to say that Tolkien’s version of the story is accurate either?
There are newer editions than the one I’ve linked to here. This happens to be the edition I own.
And mine comes on February 9, 2012.
While I have always identified myself as male, I have never identified with the classic male stereotype. Kudos to this teacher for educating young students about gender. As my mother-in-law Virginia used to say, “There are enough ways in the world for everyone to have one of their own.” Hopefully, someday, the human race will be mature enough to recognize that each person will express their gender, sexuality, personality, intelligence, physicality, spirituality in their own unique way.
If every child in the United States left Santa two cookies and a glass of milk, how many calories would he consume? 19 billion.
This is so cool.
I have always liked code samples in blog postings, but I have never liked the need to scroll horizontally to see the tail end of long lines. In preparing my site for migration from WordPress to Octopress I read and reread Paul Stamatiou’s How to: WordPress to Jekyll about a dozen times. In that article I admired the expanding view of code examples. When you moused over the code it expanded in width to allow you to see most, if not all, of its width at once.
It turns out this is relatively easy to accomplish through the use of the CSS hover selector. What is more complicated is getting the expanded content to properly overlay the aside content in the default Octopress theme. After pestering a couple of my work mates (thanks @gpennington and @worksology) I now have the proper combination of z-index and position:relative to properly expand the code blocks, even when there is sidebar content involved.
Here is the code I added to my sass/custom/_styles.scss to make this all work:
{% raw %}
article { overflow: visible; }
figure[role="code"]:hover, .gist:hover { width: 800px; overflow: inherit; position: relative; z-index: 2;}
aside[role="sidebar"] { z-index: 1; }
{% endraw %}This will cause code blocks and embedded gists to expand when the mouse pointer is over them, and if they are along side of aside material, the expansion will be on top of that content as well. Based on any thematic changes you may have made to the default Octopress theme, you may need to adjust the width value to suit.
“The bar was walked into by the passive voice.”
For the TextMate 2 nerd on your Christmas list.
Since switching to Octopress my site has used Disqus to manage comments. Migrating my existing comments from WordPress was simple, and managing them all in Disqus, has been a breeze. Of course I don’t have or get that many so I’m not taxing the Disqus system at all.
The default Octopress theme, which I’ve slightly modified, doesn’t show any comment indication on the main index pages. After some assistance from Divya on the #octopress IRC channel I’ve modified my site to display comment counts for all postings.
Postings that I create, like this one, will have the comment count displayed just beneath the posting title. Link style postings will have the comment count displayed after the posting. In both cases the comment link takes you to the permanent link for the posting.
The code for displaying the comment link is simple and straight forward:
{% raw %}
{% if site.disqus_short_name and post.comments != false and site.disqus_show_comment_count == true and post.url %}
<a class="commentinfo" href="{{ root_url }}{{ post.url }}#disqus_thread" data-disqus-identifier="https://zanshin.net{{ post.url }}">Comments</a>{% endif %}
{% endraw %}Just substitute your site’s information, and add the site.disqus_show_comment_count attribute to your _config.yml file and you should be good to go.