New logo for Rabbit Software

I made a new logo for Rabbit Software:

Richard loves the Barry Flanagan leaping hare, but we don't want to infringe on creative copyright. We've seen one of these wonderful sculptures at the Virginia Museum of Art.

Wheel of Time Online Resources

This material was first published on Dreams & Speculation: Winter's Heart Mid-month Discussion.

Here are some valuable Wheel of Time online resources. My list is necessarily incomplete, because there is so much material available. Please add links to your favorite sites in the comments.

Can't keep up with a Wheel of Time read-through?

Not to worry! Hop on to one of the read-through summary sites below, to get acquainted with the books you missed, and you’ll be ready to start on this month’s book, and join in the discussion. I assure you, you’ll be just fine. Only those masochistic enough to want to savor every word — you know who you are — will feel that they’ve missed something. Many of us are eager to find out what Brandon Sanderson does with the completion of the Wheel of Time. If you can read a few of Jordan’s novels, you’ll be able to better appreciate Sanderson’s accomplishment.

Please note that websites are ephemeral. Wheel of Time fan sites are disappearing faster than they are appearing as the series nears completion, and as fans move beyond their enthusiasms. Many of the sites, even if they exist, have broken links and server errors because they are no longer maintained.

Read-throughs and synopses of the Wheel of Time novels

Foremost among these, for its depth, wit, and authority:
Leigh Butler’s Wheel of Time Re-read on Tor, the WoT publisher
Superbly, entertainingly written. Relatively spoiler-free if you don’t read the comments.

If that’s too long for you, try the solely plot-focused Wheel of Time Summary
Click the characters in the right column to see where they appear in the books and chapters. When I checked, the rest of that site had gone offline just days ago. Thanks to Google cache you can still see some of the other pages, but the summary is the meat.

If you want just a little more detail, try the Enyclopaedia WoT chapter summaries for each book
Warning: To avoid spoilers, do not read the notes, just read the summary.

Some small modifications of the SimpleFolio Wordpress theme

I'm using the delightful SimpleFolio Wordpress theme for the Rabbit Software website. I made a donation; it's nice to support good opensource work.

I found a few issues with it that I have addressed.

1. The single post view was incorrectly showing the excluded "Portfolio" category in its Recent Posts sidebar widget. In this theme, you can select a specific category to populate the homepage slideshow. One doesn't necessarily want those posts to appear as normal blog posts. Unfortunately, the exclusion function wasn't working on the single post view page. This problem is easily addressed by editing the sf_portfolio_filter function in the theme's functions.php file.

Change line 50,

if(!is_archive() && !is_admin() && !is_single()){

to

if(!is_archive() && !is_admin() ){

2. I'm using more than 3 homepage widgets, and they weren't wrapping nicely. While the first one had a proper margin-left:0, the fourth one had the default margin-left:30px. I realized there must be some javascript at work behind the scenes, inserting the inline styling to adjust the left margin. Indeed, I opened custom.js in the js folder, and found this line:

$(".home_widgets .widget:first").css("margin-left", "0");

A bit of snooping on the JQuery site clarified this usage for me, and I added this line:

$(".home_widgets .widget:eq(3)").css("margin-left", "0");

to make the 2nd line of 3 widgets line up with the first batch.


3. Of course, I've made a few custom tweaks to the stylesheet so far, such as adding more space below the unordered lists in the .home_widgets .widget class, and adding underlines to the links in the .home_widgets .textwidget.

I made the Rabbit Software website

I made a very simple WordPress-blog-based website for Richard's new adventure in consulting:

rabbitsoftware.com

Review: The Last Page

Please see my guest-blogger review of Anthony Huso's fantasy novel, The Last Page at Dreams & Speculation.