Ooookay…I think I have successfully upgraded to WordPress 2.0. It seems like everything has gone okay. The only thing I am not sure about is the Feedburner stuff; the plugin is not compatible with WP2 and the workaround was a little confusing for me. Hopefully nobody is reading with wp-rss.php or wp-rss2.php directly, because I’m not sure what to do with those, but the main URLs - /feed and the legacy full.xml - seem to redirect okay. I am really going to miss Live+Press until it is updated to work with WP2; I will go back to manually copying my entries into LiveJournal. But unteins has always been pretty responsive in Live+Press development so I’m sure something will happen with that eventually. There are a few other plugins I have yet to test - Text Replace and The Execution of All Things being important ones I’d like to get back. But for now it seems to have gone okay, I think/hope.

Today is the first day of winter, so I’ve switched to the new winter layout I created a month or two ago. The only person I’d shown it to so far was Kristine, so pretty much everybody reading this should go take a look and let me know what they think. (That link is hard-coded, so if you had already picked a different theme on my site it will now be the winter theme.) I designed the whole thing myself using a picture from SXC. I finally learned how to do slices, heh! I think it came out pretty nice. The post formatting isn’t as good as it could be but the site itself is not bad.

Today was a rather LiveJournally day. I didn’t sleep well, so I was kind of out of it for most of the morning and just goofing off. I suddenly realized I was late for tikva’s birthday lunch at Oriental East in Silver Spring. Obviously dim sum is not a favorite treat for me due to the few vegetarian options, but I do like sesame balls and pineapple buns so I didn’t mind going - I figured I could always get something after if I was still hungry. I got there about half an hour late but I wasn’t the last one there, although I was the only latecomer who was late due to carelessness and not previous engagements! Anyway, I got to meet three new friends, bringing the total number of people on my friends list that I have met to 56! (That’s about one-third if you drop out the duplicate journals and the journals written by cats, even though I have met both of the cats with journals.) I really enjoyed these people - zaph and I seem to have a fair bit in common in terms of personality, if not necessarily interests; I found him quite interesting to talk to. antuvschle was kind of quiet compared to the rest of us chatterboxes, but she seems really cool, she lives in the town where I grew up, and she gives hugs the first time you meet her! (Now that’s cool.) I was a little bit intimidated by sskipstress, probably because she is both pretty and intelligent and I always wonder how people who impress me are perceiving me when we interact. It was a very good lunch overall - I did get enough to eat! - even though I missed seeing tikva’s guide dog Brodie, who was at home.

Tonight I spent a while completely revamping my LiveJournal design. I decided to go back to S1, the style system that I actually understand, and I used a design from Open Source Web Design to make a unique look for myself. Returning to S1 means I don’t get attractively-formatted talk pages, but I will probably stick with it for a while. If you want to see the new design, check it out here. I was pretty pleased with the way the Flickr badges came out; you can’t use the usual badge generator because Livejournal won’t allow Javascript but rd84 created a scriptless badge generator!

• I really should redo my sidebar. I haven’t updated it to change the Divinitas link into a link to my main TCG page even though Divinitas has been dead for months and I’ve joined a couple of others. There’s also just random junk in there I can get rid of.
• I need to wash my Qbee quilt.
• I have found that, as I was told by a Google staffer, Google Analytics is indeed chugging right along despite it thinking it’s not properly installed on my site. It doesn’t really tell me anything useful, though, so I am hoping to get a Measure Map invitation soon. Also, I clearly have smart readers, because 48.4% are using Firefox and only 46.6% are using IE!
• I have earned upwards of $15 from the Mechanical Turk; I think I will get all the way to $25 (free shipping) before redeeming anything into my Amazon account.
• I’m not sure why I’m posting this in my journal and not in my lovely self-hosted installation of Tasks.

I am finally fed up enough with the usual Friday chattering and slacking at work that I have turned on Launchcast to try to tune them out. Music is not a major part of my life, so I almost never do this; I also have it incredibly low - I almost can’t hear it when I’m typing on my clickety keyboard. And yes, I am aware that I am sucking bandwidth, but they’re all just gabbing anyway rather than using their computers.

I am disappointed, because I forgot that the PHP editor I was using was not shareware - it expired after 30 days. I liked it because it was almost an IDE - it had a web server built in, so all I had to do was install PHP on my machine and I could view my work right in the program. It’s 35 euros ($41), though, and I’m not at a point where I can justify that. I do occasionally buy software, and if I were really skilled with PHP I would purchase this editor, but I’m still messing around with it. So now I can use either HTML-Kit or TextEdit and upload work to my site to test it, or I can just edit the stuff right on the site (I use a locally-installed version of net2ftp), but that would be bad because there would be no syntax highlighting. And I like syntax highlighting! PHP Expert Editor’s was the best, but the other two at least have it as an option. But oh hey, I just looked at the HTML-Kit plugins - there’s a whole lot that make PHP development easier. Okay, so I will probably use HTML-Kit even though I find all the buttons and menus somewhat overwhelming. Still doesn’t have a webserver, but it’ll have to do.

I would really like to make a design for the CSS Zen Garden. The page itself says that only graphic artists should submit designs, but I don’t see why I couldn’t give it a try. The resources page has tips and they make the project seem over my head, but perhaps I can work on this together with someone else. Kristine, Eka, have you ever thought of doing a Zen Garden design? Would you be interested in joining me? Anyone else feel up to it? Here are my favorite designs already on the site.

1. 45 rpm
2. Pretty in Pink
3. Vin Rouge
4. Simple
5. Par Avion
6. Cube Garden
7. Skyroots
8. Mediterranean
9. New Groove
10. Zunflower

Could somebody please explain to me how the Republic of Ireland is connected to both France and Benelux by train and not boat? WTF?

Tip: do not watch The Sixth Sense for the first time ever late at night and then have to go into the basement to do laundry.

In other news, I am totally obsessed with Faerie Bubbles.

Oh, I updated the design on my site. I finally gave up trying to find Illogirly and making my own fall layout, so I found a very nice one from Quixotic Pixels. I love that she included a blank header graphic! It was pretty easy to tweak for WordPress, although I had to do a bit of funky stuff with the comments section because the provided layout didn’t have comments. So if you’re reading on LiveJournal or have chosen a different skin (i.e., you’re not using the “default”), go check it out. Yes, it is a very dark design, but I like it!

These are goofy quiz results. Nothing to see here, move along.
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Tonight I am attempting to convert my community site from PHP-Nuke to Invision Power Board. I tried to just use the PHPbb converter for IPB, but that didn’t work too well. I am presently converting from PHP-Nuke to PHPbb (ironically, I did the reverse quite some time ago), and from there I will try the IPB conversion. Unfortunately, PHP-Nuke uses standard dates while PHPbb uses Unix-style dates, so I am manually converting everything (with some help). Fortunately I only have about 160 users, and I’m almost done.

Also, we’ve had CBS on for a little while, because neither of us is really watching and we can’t be bothered to change it. The show Threshold is on right now, and Brent Spiner is a regular on it! I had no idea. Whee! Yes, I am a huge geek.

Added: That took me a couple of hours and I have very little to show for it. I managed to convert from PHP-Nuke to PHPbb successfully, that was fine. But then I had the same problem with the conversion to IPB, which leads me to think that I didn’t need to do the Nuke-PHPbb conversion after all. I ended up dumping the PHPbb installation altogether; I stashed the tables in my Nuke database so I haven’t lost all that work at least. I dumped the IPB installation too. Maybe I will try again later, maybe not.

I have finally discovered the purpose and usefulness of Pages within WordPress; geeky rambling ensues.
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Thanks to the very astute Levi, I have found and fixed a problem with my feeds. For some reason WordPress includes an XML declaration that FeedBurner can’t handle, so I had originally edited that. When I reinstalled WordPress recently, it overwrote the feed files I had edited with the incompatible ones. Levi called my attention to my broken feed, and it took me a few minutes to figure out what the problem was. As soon as I did, though, I edited all of my feeds by hand and got rid of that bad declaration. Poof! Problem solved, and my feed is up and running and happy again. If you haven’t already subscribed, there are some handy links to do so right on the burned feed itself.

Added: I figured I’d give LivePress another shot, and it synced perfectly. Yay!