Well, here you are at the capacious new premises of Club Troppo (formerly Troppo Armadillo).
Just about all the grunt, grind and skill involved in creating this shiny revamped WordPress blog has been contributed by the amazing (and amazingly patient) Stephen Bounds. We are deeply grateful.
Stephen has imported all the old Troppo Armadillo posts, and fixed most of the glitches that occurred during that process. If you notice any really irritating problems, please feel free to draw them to our attention in the comment box to this post. I can’t guarantee that I’ll fix them instantaneously, because I’m still learning the ropes of the WordPress interface and functionality. But I’m hoping all the bugs will be ironed out by New Year.
We are yet to enable the authoring access of any Troppo Armadillo contributors besides Nicholas and myself. I intend working through that process later today and will notify you by email about your access details. Please contact me if you haven’t heard by the end of today (Wednesday).
Finally, aspiring commenters should note that one of the anti-spam features we have installed here at Club Troppo is a gizmo whereby your initial comment will be placed on moderation i.e. it won’t actually appear on the blog until either Nicholas or I have approved it. However, the approval process is “once-only” and all subsequent comments should appear instantaneously. As with Armadillo, comments are welcome. We look forward to continuing robust but civil debate. Welcome to ze Club!
PS Many thanks also to the great Scott Wickstein (a true pioneer and mentor of the Australian blogosphere if ever there was one) for creating the old Troppo Armadillo site and hosting it gratis for the last two years.
Niiiiccceeee and shiny, love it.
Looks good!
Do you have an RSS feed I can plug into my blog?
DOH! Found it.
Woooow; soon a new year and already a new house – big things in the Parishsphere this year. Congratulations and happy holidays :-))
Very nice and clean. Methinks a good spit and polish was overdue – well done!
Very flash – yet clean and minimal, I like the white background contrasted with pale blue and that other colour, a shade of cack, I guess. Thanks for the changing quotes some of which which I will no doubt lift from time to time for my own poiposes.
It does look nice. Kind of summery.
Maybe its cos I don’t use background pics and 99% of the time have images off but I don’t like the white background.
Other than that the site is just dandy.
Whilst I think of it under options/permalinks in the admin panel of wordpress u can put the date and topic in the post rather than just a generic number. Personally I think that makes it more user-friendly.
you new site knows no bounds!
I am gruen with envy parish the thought.
It’s uncanny, but for mine, “Club Troppo” reflexively references that terrifying contribution to the western music canon, ‘Club Tropicana” (drinks are free), by the irritatingly unforgettable, Wham!
“Let me take you to the place
Where membership’s a smiling face,
Brush shoulders with the stars.
Where strangers take you by the hand,
And welcome you to wonderland -
From beneath their panamas…
Chorus:
Club Tropicana, drinks are free,
Fun and sunshine – there’s enough for everyone.
All that’s missing is the sea,
But don’t worry, you can suntan!
Castaways and Lovers meet,
Then kiss in Tropicana’s heat,
Watch the waves break on the bay.
Soft white sands, a blue lagoon,
Cocktail time, a summer’s tune,
A whole night’s holiday!
Chorus 2x:
Club Tropicana, drinks are free,
Fun and sunshine – there’s enough for everyone.
All that’s missing is the sea,
But don’t worry, you can suntan!
x2
Pack your bags,
And leave tonight.
Don’t take your time,
Gotta move your feet, don’t you miss the flight!
Cool, cool, cool, cool
Chorus:
Club Tropicana, drinks are free,
Fun and sunshine – there’s enough for everyone.
All that’s missing is the sea,
But don’t worry, you can suntan!
2x
Cool, cool, cool, cool”
Anyway, I like the crisp, stark layout, albeit I’m a bit dubious about the Laura Ashley powder blue, Fijian resortwear backdrop. Particularly where -I guess, inevitably – it quarrels with the cerebral wheat-toned sidebar.
It works.
Btw, a quote from Thomas Sowell on the header is potentially controversial for a MOR blog :)
Looks fab! Bookmarks will be duly updated.
Are html tags allowed in comments now? If you instal Akismet, you should get almost no spam. It’s a WP plugin which has killed 2760 spam comments at LP since we installed it. The nice thing is that it’s capable of learning, and returns very few false positives, though it has taken it a while to understand that Homer and Jack Strocchi’s comments are not spam :)
While you’re renovating, Ken, you might like to update my URL:
http://aftergrogblog.blogs.com/agb/
Or you might not.
Looks very good, Ken. Excellent makeover (and I mean that in the nicest way).
The changeable quotes on the banner page are a lovely touch.
And the armadillo nose still whiffles! I yam a happy man.
The date on the left is clever. Personally I prefer a fixed width column for the blogtext, but that’s because I have a wide screen.
Good luck with this new avatar.
Very classy. You guys sooo owe this Stephen Bounds fellow a beer :).
If it handles HTML it will be well worth commenting on.
Congratulations are due. At long last HTML works in comments.
Howebver, links in comments aren’t marked — perhaps some minor tweaking could be in order,
Now, after all that fine work (and the site does look good), WordPress 2.0 has just been released.
All the best for the New Year!
One thing I just noticed from my post above is that links via tags as in ‘WordPress 2.0′ appear the same colour as the rest of the comment text (well, at least on my monitor) and will be easily missed.
Congratulations! Looks great!
congratulations, well done
Looks great!
Thanks for the positive feedback on the look of the new site.
Two suggestions were too good to pass up — you’ll notice that comment links should now be underlined and have a slightly more obvious shading.
I’ve also updated the permalinks to use the more user-friendly URL scheme suggested by Vee (and fixed the link to After Grog Blog).
Is there some pointed reason why I’m the only blogger de-linked at the new site? Pray tell.
If your updating links Ken.
Steve Edwards new home is
http://www.libertarian.org.au/
Todd McKenzie and Murph
http://www.gravett.org/sauce/
Norman Hanscombe
Is still kicking and will be back soon hopefully.
Alan Anderson and James Morrow
http://www.investigatemagazine.com/
Bizarre Science
No longer online.
CL that is because you are part of the last rites not new right movement!
I only just noticed the pink crab and seashell motif. Very pleasant and cooling too – a bit girlie perhaps, but that’s nice too. Please dont’ change it because I said it was girlie. Please don’t attack me because i said so – I’m not up to it at the moment. I should just shut up and go for a swim.
Without risk there is no faith, and the greater the risk the greater the faith.
–
Is it my RSS plug-in feed detector or is there no RSS feed yet for your home page? I suppose Steve’s getting around to it.
It doesn’t really bother me that your armadillo is now not only exotic but amphibious.
It’s Xmas and I’m allowed to be a pedant at this time of the year. Who is URI?
Looks nice and is a pretty colour for the gals. Someone pointed that out, but I say that in a good way.
David, do you mean URL, which, I think, is the address of a website?
URI stands for Uniform Resource Identifiers. The WordPress people seem to prefer it to URL.
Here is the Wikipedia entry on it.
AlanDownUnder: http://www.clubtroppo.com.au/feed/ should give you the site feed.
There was a small glitch with the site motto via RSS which I have fixed but it seems OK now. I don’t use RSS a lot so I’m not sure how “feed detection” works — I always just manually subscribe to feeds by pasting in the relevant URI.
By the way, the short explanation of the difference between a URI and URL is that a URL should point somewhere “real”; a URI doesn’t have to.
In other words, all URLs are also URIs, but not vice versa.
Example:
http://www.clubtroppo.com.au is a valid URI and URL.
troppo:entry/2005/12/28 is a valid URI, but not a valid URL.
Administrator: what was the reason for my link being removed? Don’t care, just interested;)
CL
I haven’t the foggiest idea how or why your blog managed to get deleted from the blogroll. I’m assume it was just an inadvertent casualty of Stephen’s re-organising the blogroll categories and order. I’ll restore it just as soon as I work out how. I’ve been completely off the air for the last week with a broken PC. If Stephen or Nicholas sees this before I manage to work out how to update the blogroll (or even access it), maybe one of them will do it.
Anyway, I’m back on the air now, at least until tomorrow night when we fly to Sydney for 9 days. Internet access will probably again be dodgy for that period, but with any sort of luck Nicholas will keep things on an even keel.
A peaceful and prosperous (if belated) New Year to all Troppo readers!
Have you seen the SMH article today about Young Labor’s (NSW) policy to reintroduce conscription/national service. Being a 50 something & one who marched & otherwise struggled to overturn 24 years of coalition rule & rid this country of such fascist policies I find it hard to fashion words that would adequately capture the rage I feel.
Happy new year, Ken!
Jeff – lots of discussion of the Young Labor nasho stuff at various blogs.
Hi Ken,
Love the new seaside digs!
Can you email me when you get the chance?