So the other day I decided enough was enough and started fresh. As this is my personal blog, I wanted a design that was fun, interesting and showcased various things I like. I also wanted a bit of a sandbox that I could play in with new CSS3 and HTML5 goodness. And so the 2012 edition of the site was born.

One of my objectives was to make the site lighter (in weight, not colour), but still be a bit of a visual smack in the face. As such I’m using CSS instead of images for display elements wherever possible — true, this is a good practice all around, but one that is easily ignored or forgotten when you’re eager to get things “just so”. Fortunately CSS3 support is pretty much across the board now (thanks for joining the group IE9, your dusty nametag is by the door), and that opens up a huge palette for a Web designer to play with.

This has resulted in a theme that uses only about 10KB of “layout” images, not counting the various background photos (which can be customized page-by-page — see the about page) or the slightly heavier home page due to those big social icons.

<rant>
However, if you still happen to be using an old browser, things are going to look a bit sketchy for you. I spend a lot of time making client sites backwards compatible, and it’s frustrating. Next to bookkeeping, it’s about the most mundane and irritating part of my gig. The truly insulting bit is that there are few things simpler than upgrading to a modern browser, and yet people refuse to do so. And this is why for my site, my site, I’ve said “to hell with it” and have barely given those fools a code line of consideration (if you are part of the 2% that come here using IE6 or IE7, I just called you a fool, de-fooling yourself is easy). A modern Web experience and browser security obviously isn’t a priority to people who are using 10-year-old browser tech, and I’d be doing them a disservice by enabling them to continue using it.
</rant>

Anyway, the design still has little ways to go, and there are lots of small (and largely long-forgotten) legacy things that will need to be dealt with (the downside to running this blog for a little more than 8 years now — seven of which have been in China — is that the way I laid things out in the past is a far cry from the more standard way I do things now, lesson learned).

One other change is that I’ve done away with Disqus for comments. As a rule, I try to avoid 3rd party integration for things that core software does well enough. I wanted to give Disqus a try though and so had installed it with the last update (a year ago). Overall, I like Disqus’ functionality, and I like that it pretty seamlessly can be enabled and disabled (you’ll notice all comments made during my Disqus trial are still there and still in the proper hierarchy). It also has some great SNS integration. However, I do a lot of work with WordPress, and I’m used to the WordPress way of managing comments. Because of that, the Disqus system never really felt comfortable to me.

I think that about covers it. Hopefully the new theme is as enjoyable to visit as it was to put together.

I started using “The Humanaught” back in November 2003, when I created a LiveJournal blog to capture my travels as I set out with a backpack and a couple of guidebooks, anxious about leaving my home continent for the first time. Amazingly the LiveJournal site is still there, though all the posts have long-ago been imported here.

After 5 months of travel I returned home and the Humanaught blog went on hiatus as I went about saving up money for my next grand adventure — not knowing at the time that it would eventually lead to living in China for more than half a decade. In the fall of 2004 I registered thehumanaught.com and began playing with creating my own Web site, eager to reformat the content I had created while travelling, while also preparing for my move to China in January 2005.

This is when I discovered Blogger, and their ability to publish a blog using their management system but your own hosting. At the time it seemed somewhat akin to the promise of flying cars. I continued blogging this way until May 2006 when I moved completely to a self-hosted blog using WordPress for the first time. Considering what I do with my days now, it was an auspicious move to be sure.

Truth be told, I grew tired of “thehumanaught” quite some time ago. At first it served to add a bit of anonymity, which seemed so much more important in the early days — long (in Internet time) before Facebook shared the details of my life and Twitter captured every fleeting thought that flitters through my brain. Additionally, over the years I’ve been using it I had built a small but (mostly) respectable name for myself in the online sinosphere, and that was the name I was known by.

But I think it’s fair to say that most people who know me by “the humanaught” now also know me as “Ryan”, and for the people yet to get to know me, I’d rather we get started on a real-name basis.

I’d be being a bit disingenuous if I didn’t also say that moving to ryan-mclaughlin.com wasn’t also to help establish, build and control my personal branding. It’s not exactly a term I’m comfortable with or really feel worthy of, but I cannot escape the fact that I make my living online and my reputation (and by extension, name) play a large factor in that.

The last, but potentially largest, reason for the re-dubbing is simply that the focus of this blog has changed a lot since it was first created. Originally it was my outlet for sharing travel tales and stories about living in China. And while I’ll still be blogging about both on occasion, most of my about-China writing takes place at Lost Laowai these days, and travel … well for the time being at least, our new baby has made us pretty stationary (* with the exception of some rather large news I’ll be writing about soon).

And so here we are, a new dawn of sorts for this site. A new name, a completely new look (which I’m still tweaking) and hopefully a bunch of new content — untethered and gloriously unfocused. Some blogs are about specific things, this one is just about me and everything I like to think/talk/write about. I hope you enjoy it.

I’ll be tweaking some design elements over the next little while, but the biggest change is that I’m now importing posts I write at all my blogs (Lost Laowai, The Tech Dynasty, Dao By Design and Tip Trick Mod) into my stream here.

Though this blog’s focus is primarily on my expat life in Suzhou, I also want it to be a bit of a snapshot of me in general, and with so many writing/blogging projects on the go across the Web, I wanted a way to pull them all together.

If you are a reader of my other blogs, don’t fret, I’ll not be clogging up your feed readers with a bunch of duplicate content. The Humanaught feed will only contain articles specifically written for this blog. Also, all content coming from off-site (say from my new CNET Asia blog) will be clearly marked, and link directly to the original post.

Thanks for your patience if you happen to be at the site while I’m mucking about.

Thanks for understanding.

First: you’ll notice that I’ve changed the comment submit layout. When I initially designed the look of this site, I was eager to try some new things, and so had the comment submission form stuck at the top of the comments.

This was stupid – I realize this now. It just never fit with the flow of how people read I don’t think. Rare is the occasion that I read a blog and wish to comment without first checking out what others have said. Additionally, I never liked how small the box was.

So, it’s back at the end of the comments – and has some nice new graphics to accompany it.

Next: I’ve FINALLY updated the site’s front page. Bet you didn’t even know the site HAD a front page! When I initially set up this site back in late 2004, I did so with the idea of blogging about my impending trip to China, as well as moving all my old LiveJournal travel blogging onto its own home, and doing some other stuff – though I was never clear about what that other stuff was… maybe a photo gallery, or a home for some of my music…

Blogging, and specifically blogging platforms, has come a long way in the past four years and I can do most if not all that I wish internally in WordPress. And as it turns out, I never really had time or clarity for that “other stuff” anyway. So – homepage updated – basically just works as navigation for the blog and shows off (a) my other sites, and (b) my FriendFeed – a cool service that keeps track of what you’re doing on various social sites (flickr, youtube, del.icio.us, twitter, blogs, etc.).

Next Next: The top menu text has been replaced by their equivalent iconic representations. I think we can all figure out what they mean, and the mouseover text should help the stragglers. The text was always overlapping the image’s shadow, and it has been pissing me off for months. Having the hood popped on things finally gave me the opportunity to correct it.

Last: I’m not sure when it happened, but I killed my vBlog. It would appear that when I transferred my site to a new server a few months back I neglected to copy the database that powered the second install of WordPress I had running to manage my vBlog entries. Meh, there’s not been a new vBlog since 2006, so it wasn’t as if anyone was missing anything really.

However, and this isn’t an announcement (and I’ll deny it if asked directly), I’ve been considering starting to vlog again. It might give me an excuse to get my ass out of the house a bit more.

Regardless if I do or don’t find the time to, I did want to bring the old vlog entries into the fold. Doing so gave me a chance to mess around with some design ideas and WordPress trickery that I’ve had for a while now. You can see the results (and the old vlog entries) here:

• vLog.01: Chuar!
• vLog.02: A Chinese Wedding
• vLog.03: Field Trip!
• vLog.04: Morning Exercises
• vLog.05: Dalian Tour
• vLog.06: The Road To Suzhou
• vLog.07: Happy Birthday Sis

So, that’s it – largely just some cleaning up on things I’ve been meaning to sort out for some time, but haven’t had the time. I still don’t have the time, but I’m realizing more and more, I never will. Meh, it’s over-rated anyway.

HHR is a social bookmarking site for all us sinophiles that just love reading blog posts and news about China. Essentially it works the same as other social bookmarking sites (digg, netscape, del.ico.us, etc.), whereby community members submit links for everyone to vote on. If a story gets enough votes it gets promoted to the front page.

In so doing, visitors can get a quick glance at what the most popular stories circulating the English-language Sinosphere are. Simple enough eh?

Well, if you’ve not visited recently, or are just hearing about the HHR, you may have missed a major overhaul. We’ve upgraded a bunch of things and added some new features, including:

• New Look: We’re still working the kinks out of the slick new look. Let us know what you think.
• The Bury Feature: This has been a long time coming – but finally all users will have the ability to “bury” posts that are bu hao.
• An Unvote Feature: Get a little too friendly with your mouse? Vote for something you didn’t mean to? No problem! Just go to your profile, click on the Voted tab and you can take back any vote you mistakenly gave.
• Latest Comments: I love this feature on blogs, and I’m happy to have it now on here. Now when you post a comment it gets displayed for all to see on the sidebar of every page. A great way to see what people are talking about at a glance.
• Save Stories: Like a story a bit more than just a “hao” click? Worried you might not be able to find the link again? Well, now you can just click the “Save” link below each submission. Check out your “Saved” stories on your Profile page.

Tools

We’ve also updated and added some things in the Webmaster Tools section. New graphics to pepper your blog or Web site with, and a new feature that allows you to display the latest submissions right on your site! (see the Lost Laowai blog’s right-hand sidebar for an example)

As always, if you’ve any problems getting this stuff to work or are a little scared to start mucking around with code – just fire us an e-mail and we’re happy to help you out.

And still…

And just to remind you, we’ve also got:

• Revenue sharing with Google Ads (your submissions can earn you cold, hard cash).
• A bunch of handy Webmaster/Blogmaster tools to help your blog’s readers submit your stories to HHR.
• Private messaging between HHR friends.
• The ability to submit videos (from YouTube, Google Video and Xoinks).
• The nifty Tag Cloud to show you what topics are hottest.

And a whole lot more. As always, we hope you’ll let us know your thoughts about the Hao Hao Report. If you find some bugs, step on them (or let us know so we can step on them).

This is one of the handful of reasons I’ve not been posting much recently. Rather than bore everyone by blogging about how this snippet of code isn’t doing what it’s supposed to, or open source this, php that… I’ve got some finished projects coming out the pipe, and will be announcing them shortly (that’s more fun for everyone).

Thanks for bearing with me.