This was going to be a poll, but I decided to get rid of it. Tant pis. Instead, feel free to check out WP-Polls, a really snazzy poll plugin for WordPress users.

Oh dear. Dan said that upgrading to WordPress 2.2 was a snap, so I didn’t bother to make any backups of the site files or the database before I upgraded. It turns out that the King Text widget is not compatible with WP 2.2, and without it my entire site design is hosed. So I’ve rolled back to the default WordPress theme, and I’ve got multiple leads on a fix but nothing concrete yet. What I really want is for the King Text authors to update the plugin - that would solve everything - but people have been commenting on the site for a couple of weeks now with no response, so I’m not too optimistic in that arena. Hopefully I can get everything resolved quickly, but I’m nervous.

The quicklinks are going to be temporarily on hold until I can get Postalicious working. I am determined to make this sucker work and then I can do all kinds of things with the quicklinks posts. But meanwhile, it is being standoffish, and I have exhausted all my ideas so I’m waiting to hear back from support requests in various places.

I will kick that plugin’s ass.

I’ve unveiled the Valentine’s theme on my site; you can click here to see it. (If you don’t like it, click here to go back to the old one.) It was created 100% by me using an image I bought off iStockPhoto; the fancy post titles are from the Fancy Headlines plugin and the fancy section titles are a direct implementation of the ALA Dynamic Text Replacement tutorial.

• Tips and tricks for browsing adult sites on the Internet
  Pop-up windows, spam, viruses… annoying ploys to part you from your money. But the it doesn’t have to be that way. You can enjoy trouble free browsing of adult sites if you follow a few simple rules…
  (tags: sex)
• Classic Dykes
  Welcome to the home for lesbians and all wimmin affirming wimmin in midlife and beyond.
  (tags: queer women)
• The Truth about Cochlear Implants
  Elisa tells us about the hidden dangers of cochlear implants - like not being able to ride in a hybrid car, or not being able to ride a roller coaster that has magnetic brakes.
  (tags: deaf)
• Cute baby pandas get playful
  Deaf-friendly video of the only thing in the WORLD that’s as cute as baby meerkats.
  (tags: animals)

Now that I have got Postie working for e-mail postings, and my theme widget-ready thanks to King Text, I am focusing my full attention on tagging with Ultimate Tag Warrior. I’ve already eliminated categories from my theme, replacing them with tags.

Folksonomy is really moving forward in the direction of tags, rather than categories. I’ve been using a list of just a couple dozen categories for a long time, and I often found myself slapping generic categories onto posts rather than creating a new category for what I was actually writing about. I’d like to be able to use a tag cloud to see what I write about most, and to identify what posts are really about - “PayPal,” for example, rather than “internet,” and “assholes” rather than “people.”

Tagging 3500 posts is going to be a monumental task, because I have to read, or at least skim, every single post. So far I’ve worked backwards up to April 2006…but I’ve been blogging for more than five years. So this is going to take a while.

I am testing my post-by-email function. I’m pretty sure it will work for LiveJournal, and I think it will work on WordPress, but I’m not 100% sure. I don’t really have anything useful to say, I just wanted to try out my email posting! (I am sending this to two addresses, rather than posting to WordPress and letting Live+Press do the dirty work.) Whee!

I realized I didn’t have any way of checking stats easily for CyDy Blog (NSFW), so I wanted to find a WordPress plugin that could do it for me. Colleen had recommended a WP plugin called ShortStat, but I thought I would look for other options and I came across the seemingly-robust FireStats. I’ve installed it over at CyDy Blog, and I decided to put it over here too. I never remember to check my MeasureMap stats (a quick glance reveals 59,332 visitors since I started using it a year ago, minus some from when I changed my design and forgot to put the MeasureMap code back) or my Analog stats, and Google Analytics doesn’t like me for some reason, so I thought perhaps having it in my WP admin screens would get me to check it out more often.

I’ve also installed Anti-Leech on both sites. It’s another WP plugin, this time with the intention of fighting back against splogs that steal your content.

I went to the dentist today for my six-month cleaning and I had absolutely perfect teeth. I was due for x-rays, and the dentist said those looked absolutely perfect. The hygienist commented that my teeth “don’t keep much tartar” (which I guess is good), and the dentist gave my teeth a very quick glance and said they looked great. I sometimes worry that the overlap of my teeth, which isn’t severe enough to need braces, will cause problems because it’s hard to clean, but every time I go they’re fine.

With this post I am testing the new version of Live+Press, the WordPress plugin that automatically synchronizes your LiveJournal and also causes LJ tags (like woofiegrrl) to work on a WordPress journal. We’ll see how it came out after I post this…

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.

I’m doing the “happy Snoopy” dance! I have been hand-copying my blog posts from Movable Type to LiveJournal for more than three years now. Every time I posted to MT, I would then copy the entry text and go to the “update journal” page on LJ and paste it in, choosing my userpic by hand, etc. I have tried various automated methods - for I while I was looking for a Windows client that could post to both MT and LJ so I could minimize the number of clicks necessary - it would still involve me doing two updates, but I wouldn’t be copying and pasting because it wouldn’t be web-based. That never worked, and neither did the LJPost plugin for MT. But with WordPress, I can automatically post to LiveJournal thanks to a spiffy plugin called LivePress. I had some problems installing it, and as I read through the 100+ comments I found various fixes for making it work with WP 1.5 and so on. And then I found the fixed-up version of LivePress which works with 1.5.1.3 (the latest WP, and what I’m using now) and is itself a minor tweak of this version of LivePress.

What really makes LivePress so jaw-droppingly superb is its support for all the little tweaks of LiveJournal. You can choose your userpic, music, mood, and security level right in the WP “Write Post” screen. You can even post directly to any community that you have rights to post to from LiveJournal. I’m not 100% sure yet, but I think you might even be able to edit an entry in WP and have LivePress automatically update the corresponding LJ entry. I am so excited by this plugin!

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