Monthly Archives: January 2012

Just a few weeks behind schedule, but a long time in the works, I’ve finally pushed the new WordPress theme for Ardamis live. Basic and elegant (I’m trying to establish a trend here), the theme also should outperform its predecessors in both page load times and SEO-potential. The index and archive pages should appear more consistent, and all pages should provide more complete structured data markup (schema.org as well as microformats.org). The comment form has been outfitted with an improved approach to reducing comment spam.

The new theme is pretty light on the graphics, due to increased browser support for and subsequently greater use of CSS3 goodness for box shadows and gradients. I’ve reduced the number of image files to two: a background and a sprites file.

Only half-implemented in the previous theme, the new look, “Joy”, makes much better use of structured data markup, or microdata. Google is absolutely looking for ways to display your pages’ semantic markup in its results, so you may as well get on board.

The frequency of spam comments increased dramatically over the past two months, according to my Akismet stats, so I’ve gone back to the drawing board and developed a better front-line defense against them. The new method should be more opaque to bots that parse JavaScript while still being invisible to human visitors leaving legitimate comments.

In sum, I think Ardamis should be leaner, faster, and smarter (and maybe prettier) in 2012 than ever before.

We inherited a number of Little Little Golden Books a few years ago. These are tiny, child-sized versions of the regular Little Golden books. I am not, for the most part, a fan of the writing in the Little Golden Books, which seems to be from the era of Dick and Jane and varies from patriarchal to nonsensical.

But the opening passage in a book called “We Help Daddy”, by Mini Stein, has stuck in my head for some time now due to its similarity to William Faulkner’s recognizable style and voices of certain of his characters in the novels “As I Lay Dying” and “The Sound and the Fury” in particular.

The story “We Help Daddy” is told in the first person by Sue, a girl of about 3 or 4 years old who helps her older brother and her father with household chores.

We help Daddy a lot, Benjy and I. Daddy fixes the attic door. He calls, “Hammer, please.”
Benjy hands him the hammer.
Then Daddy says, “Sue, are you ready to help me, too?”
I am Sue, so I hold out my hands to show I am ready.

The line beginning “I am Sue”, which would sound less unnatural coming from a Faulkner character, sounds completely out of place when spoken by a young child. It seems very unlikely that anyone’s internal monologue contains phrases like, “I am so-and-so.” I would expect this to be particularly true of young children, who, in my experience, have a very different sense of self.

Anyway, I though I’d note this before the books are outgrown and I forget about them completely.