*Phoenix Down*

Thu 28 October 2010, 5:57 PM ⁄⁄ Comment

It took me getting sick on my week off (cry) to sit down and finally do it, but Ye Olde Blogge has been restored to its previous grandeur. (There are some new pictures in the side rotation, too… very exciting.) It turns out that WordPress is pretty OK, until you want to do something that WordPress doesn’t want to do.

My designs butted heads with WordPress in two major areas: combining page caching (to cover the 0.000000001% chance that a major site ever links here) with random side images, and monthly page navigation. Getting things set up just so took something like three full days of hacking (…hacking while sick, mind you); I’ll have to write up something about that for the search engines to find, to hopefully save others some trouble in the future.

Now to see if I actually post anything of value, since I’ve spent so much time getting this place set up again….

Well, it’s a start

Mon 4 October 2010, 11:09 PM ⁄⁄ 3 Comments

As you can tell, I’ve installed WordPress. It wasn’t exactly a five minute install, but it was far easier than I had feared. (Granted, it helped tremendously that I’ve already figured out things like enabling PHP extensions and .htaccess files.) WordPress itself seems to be pretty slick, and the admin interface is soooo much faster than Movable Type’s.

As I warned, the blog will be sporting the generic WP interface for the time being. There are all sorts of rough edges, I’m sure; what’s stood out to me, initially, is that inline pictures work on the front page, but not on individual pages. That’s certainly because of my old-school habit of hardcoding references to my images, rather than using the CMS’ media capabilities… ah well, I’ll get things sorted out eventually.

Life has an annoying tendency of requiring you to destroy things in the process of improving them. (I’m reminded of Evangelion’s the fate of destruction is also the joy of rebirth.) We’re just in the middle of that whole destruction/rebirth process.

Let’s do this

Mon 4 October 2010, 6:36 PM ⁄⁄ Comment

I’m going to start the process of migrating to WordPress here (though I’m going to begin by taking a break to watch House), so things may be unusually interesting for the next {period of time | couple hours <= period of time <= couple weeks}.

(I am using math notation in a midlife crisis sort of way, to try and prove to myself that I haven’t lost all my math skillz.)

Expect this place to look unusually generic, until I wrap my head around WordPress’ templating system. On the off chance that inline pictures survive, I have included a random anime picture below, so you know you’re in the right place:

I don’t know if the RSS feeds will be in the same place when I’m done, so if you’re using that to keep tabs of my sporadic updates (I would be using RSS, too, if I were you) you may want to check back at the site proper and re-add the feed, if you don’t get any new posts after this one. You could make a snarky comment about how that wouldn’t be any different than normal, like I was going to, but then you might think about it a bit more and correctly surmise that I’ll post something once WordPress is up and running.

WordPress, ho!

Fri 1 October 2010, 12:24 AM ⁄⁄ 2 Comments

So I heard you liek mudkipz that Six Apart is getting rolled into a new corporation called SAY Media, and that SAY Media* issues press releases full of gibberish. (Six Apart is the main force behind Movable Type, the blog software I currently run.)

*It is a mystery why I bother respecting SAY Media’s inane capitalization, but don’t respect Sony’s attempt to make sure that PLAYSTATION 3 is always all-caps.

As should be blindingly obvious by now, I’m not in this to grow and monetize [my] audience. That phrase is a baseball bat to my gut, and the moment I read it was the moment I knew that my time with Movable Type was ending. Nowadays all the cool self-hosting kids are running WordPress, so I figure that’s where I’ll turn my attention when I get some free time.

…

(Yes, I do intend to start posting here again. Eventually. Soon. Tomorrow, I swear!)

Now even the spammers are mocking me:

I wish more sites would put so much time into their website.

Jerks.

Fri 24 September 2010, 11:28 PM ⁄⁄ Link ⁄⁄ Comment

Anyone else miss The Good Old Days, when the fact it was Friday the 13th was a good enough reason for at least one cable channel to run a Friday the 13th marathon?

Fri 13 August 2010, 9:08 AM ⁄⁄ Link ⁄⁄ Comment

This week at dance practice there were two fans in Barry’s and my traditional haunt. (One of the previous weeks we just had a box fan that some kind soul brought in, so this was a definite step up.) I commented on the scenario by way of witty (?) internet meme: double fan!

After replying “what does it mean?”, Barry asked me if I had seen the autotune version. I had not, but I have now. It’s totally worth it.

Tue 10 August 2010, 9:56 PM ⁄⁄ Link ⁄⁄ Comment

Turf dancing: I don’t got nothin’ on these guys.

Wed 28 July 2010, 8:48 PM ⁄⁄ Link ⁄⁄ Comment

Sledgehammer and Whore: we live in a strange, strange world.

Wed 21 July 2010, 5:27 PM ⁄⁄ Link ⁄⁄ Comment

Bionic cat walks on metal feet: the video is heartwarming; the potential for abuse is chilling. Chilling! (There’s also a later video on YouTube where Oscar has improved feet.)

Tue 20 July 2010, 9:41 AM ⁄⁄ Link ⁄⁄ Comment

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