Odd.

Update: Apparently a large power outage in San Francisco has knocked out a major data center. Other websites, including Craigslist and NetFlix, are also down.

After some digging through the new site, I have discovered some of the old bimmer.org content:

http://bimmer.roadfly.com/
http://www.roadfly.com/bmw/forums/
(Both seem to link to the same content.)

However, the article I linked to seems to be gone.

Blog.txt is a theme for WordPress designed to impact your content in the most minimal way: using whitespace as a major design element, guiding the reader to the content.

I like the overall effect of this theme. It makes good use of whitespace, which is vastly undervalued by many web designers.

I did have to make a couple of modifications to the stylesheet. The <em> tag was making text bold, and the <strong> tag was making text BOLD AND UPPERCASE. Both of these behaviors are incorrect; they should be italic and bold, respectively. (I still tend to use <i> and <b> for italic and bold anyway, as I don’t buy the “semantics” argument against <i> and <b>. I intuitively know what italicized or bolded text means, and I don’t need another set of tags to provide that concept.)

I also made the Comment field a little wider, as it was about the size of a postage stamp.

I’m debating about the ALL CAPS headlines, but interestingly it does look a bit cleaner than Mixed Case headlines, so I’m going to leave it alone for now.

WordPress 2.2’s Widgets are quite handy. I installed the Folding Pages Widget from Navy Road Software, so that my Contents (actually a listing of WordPress pages) aren’t fully expanded on the home page. WordPress’ built-in Widgets are handling the rest of the sidebar. Much nicer than hand-editing php code!

I may eventually throw a bit of subtle color into the theme, but I don’t want to go overboard and overwhem the “minimalist” feel. I would like to incorporate my previous headline pic, though.

http://www.myspace.com/bobby133

I’ve never met this person. Who is that?

I’ve also re-enabled comments for the time being. We’ll see what the spam situation looks like in a few days or weeks.

Example:
     thought one--thought 2
results in:
     thought one–thought 2

But if I add spaces around the --, I get what I want:
     thought one -- thought 2
results in:
     thought one — thought 2

That is a correct em-dash: a dash about the width of the letter ‘M’ (assuming a proportional width font).

I’m not sure what the rules of typography are regarding spaces around em-dashes, but I’ve never put them in myself. Unless I can find a configuration somewhere in WordPress to fix this, I’ll just have to start using spaces.

Update: According to the documentation, the HTML code — will produce an em-dash—just like that.