Floydm's blog

I made a few changes to the layout over the weekend. The logo has changed and is now dynamic, I've reduced the padding between some of the elements, and, most significantly, I've fixed the width of the body. Non-nerds may not care about this, but whether web pages should have a fixed width so they look the same on all machines or a flexible width so that they can take full advantage of large monitors is one of these debates that web designers discuss endlessly. I've always been in the flexible width camp, but of late I've begun to move into the fixed width camp.

Hm. Yes, must remember to remove the waffle from the oven before stepping into the shower. Does not bode well for this weekend's baking. Last week's miche turned out quite well though. And I have a couple of loaves rising right now that I'm optimistic about. In site news: I just swapped out the Drupal search with a customized Google search.

Amazingly nice weather here today. Supposed to be rainy all week, but today was definitely a day to be outside. That said, while I was planting bulbs I had a loaf rising. I did a white poolish bread that turned out excellent. I gave this about 10 minutes in the Kitchen Aid and very little yeast. I was very pleased with the crumb. I also made an apple sourdough bread.

World Bread Day is Tuesday, October 16th, a day when the bread baking guilds ask you to appreciate the role of bread and bakers in society.

Struan, banana bread, crumbbum's miche. I got much closer on the timing with the miche. Real nice oven spring and pretty nice crumb.

We had a nice get together this afternoon. Had four regular TFL participants show up (leemid, myself, JMonkey, and crumb bum) and one other reader whose screenname I didn't catch.

A beautiful pizza I made this weekend: Well, perhaps not beautiful, but tasty. This was something along the lines of LilDice's ciabatta pizza. Where did summer go? Man, it blew by. My apologies for being nearly absent on the site this summer. I read and responded to little questions almost every day, and I baked quite a bit this summer.

Weighing in at 2 pounds 8 ounces, is the mega semonlina loaf. This was a sourdough w/ a half a teaspoon of instant yeast thrown in. About... 65% hydration with about 40% of the flour semolina. It turned out pretty good. I've been meaning to mention that I have been using the Steam Maker Bread Kit when I bake something like this.

I killed another spammer's account this afternoon. While cleaning up the mess he made I noticed an inefficiency that I think has been the main issue behind some of the slow page loads here. My first attempt to fix it briefly locked up the site, but my second attempt appears to have gone smoothly. I've eliminated a database query that was happening on every page load. I don't see it causing any problems, but if you experience any weirdness please let me know.

July was a very busy month. I had family in town, the Open Source Conference to attend, many things to take care of at work and many summer activities to participate in.