Cutting Code addresses the subject of software that has previously been marginalized due to its invisibility. Software is a very mutable object that is entangled in a web of relations. Mackenzie thus sees software as a social object and process that is intrinsically linked to code as a material and practice. Software has previously been studied from a formalist approach by Manovich. The problem with such an approach is that software is abstracted from practices and contexts surrounding coding and reduced to “relations and operations (such as sorting, comparing, copying, removing) on items of data.”¹ These relations and operations are seen as quite stable forms and are often directly transfered from the field of computer science. Instead of abstracting and formalizing software Mackenzie argues for an ontology of software that deals with the mutability of software and its web of relations. Code is at the core of this web that software weaves:

[...] it treats the sociality of the software, the relations that obtain in its neighborhood, as mutable, involuted agential relations indexed by code.²

Mackenzie contributes to the emerging field of Software Studies with an interesting take on code and software. We should render software visible and notice the agency it provides, generates and distributes:

At stake here is an account of software as a highly involuted, historically media-specific distribution of agency. This account diverges from a general sociology of technology in highlighting the historical, material specificity of code as a labile, shifting nexus of relations, forms and practices. It regards software formally as a set of permutable distributions of agency between people, machines and contemporary symbolic environments carried as code. Code itself is structured as a distribution of agency.³

1. Mackenzie, Adrian. Cutting Code: Software And Sociality. Peter Lang Pub Inc, 2006. p. 4
2. Mackenzie, Adrian. Cutting Code: Software And Sociality. Peter Lang Pub Inc, 2006. p. 19
3. Mackenzie, Adrian. Cutting Code: Software And Sociality. Peter Lang Pub Inc, 2006. p. 19

I took a look at the PHP code from sidebar.php located in the templates folder (now-reading/templates/sidebar.php) and noticed the following:

<div class="now-reading"><h3>Planned books:</h3>

?php if( have_books('status=unread') ) : ?>

<ul>

<?php while( have_books('status=unread') ) : the_book(); ?>

<li><a href="<?php book_permalink() ?>"><?php book_title() ?></a> by <?php book_author() ?></li>

The class element “now-reading” determines the style of the <div> in the stylesheet which I haven’t defined (yet). I could add it in my stylesheet and adjust the font size and style but it wouldn’t fix the missing box. The plugin isn’t compatible with my WordPress theme which requires a nested lists after the header in the sidebar. A standard object in my sidebar would look like this:

<div id="sidebar">

<h2>Recent Comments</h2>

<ul id="recentcomments">

<li class="recentcomments">

But the plugin opens an unordered list after the first line of PHP is already executed. So I have to change the code in sidebar.php and start with opening an unordered list (I also removed the “Current books” header to better suit my layout):

<ul>

<?php if( have_books('status=reading') ) : ?>

<ul>

<?php while( have_books('status=reading') ) : the_book(); ?>

<li>

After adding the unordered list element the plugin displayed the books correctly.

Up next:

• Fix the other Now Reading pages such as the library which gives an overview of all the books in your database.
• Dive deeper into the hierarchy of plugins and widgets, CSS and themes.

I am not a PHP coder
I can read code and interpret most of the code so most of the time I can adjust the code to my needs but I cannot write it so that it suits my needs. I am sure I could learn it if I had the time but unfortunately time is not always on my side.

I am not a CSS coder
Some people argue CSS is not code while others argue that markup languages are in fact code (more on this later). I side myself with those who see CSS as code and I see and experience CSS as an executed markup code. The effects of the coding are not visible until it is interpreted and executed by a browser. I have never really learned CSS but because I know HTML it is fairly easy to interpret and adjust. In the early days of making websites content and markup were interwoven in HTML. With the advent of CSS those two were separated making it easier and quicker to adjust the look of a website. For example font type and size were no longer directly coded into HTML but defined in a separate Cascading Style Sheet. The fact that the style sheet is cascading means that it is highly hierarchic. This hierarchy is the main thing I struggled with while changing the design of my site.

One of the powers of style sheets is that there is a hierarchy of relationships. These relationships are defined by the concepts of cascade, inheritance, and specificity within the language of CSS.¹

I am not completely done with the redesign of my site yet but I am amazed that pretty much everything was accomplished just by changing things in the style sheet. No need to adjust the PHP except for adding one single line in the footer to show my tagcloud which was previously nested in a widget (more on PHP in widgets later). I am quite eager to dive into CSS to fine tune my site. Before and after the makeover:

The main problem I am focusing on now is the fact that my Now Reading plugin doesn’t display my books correctly. I am pretty sure this has to do with the hierarchy and inheritance aspect of style sheets.

1. Holzschlag, Molly. Cascading style sheets : the designer’s edge . San Francisco Calif.: SYBEX. p. 43