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I’ve picked out a new design for my site. I ended up going with the beautiful Illacrimo, but there were several other possibilities. I also liked DIY Theme, Bloomingday, Oceanwide, Pink Sunset, Fresh, Zen, and Beauty Bling.
Sorry folks, I just upgraded to WP 2.3 and it’s giving me nasty SQL errors on every post. Hope you can stand to read through that and find the entries. I did get all the UTW tags to convert to the new native tag system though. Woo hoo on that! Unfortunately it doesn’t appear to show the tags when you’re composing a post now…that kinda sucks.
Edit: Fixed! It was the upgraded Running Time plugin, of all things. I don’t need that, it was just a frivolous thing, so it’s gone.
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.
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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…
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Welcome to the home for lesbians and all wimmin affirming wimmin in midlife and beyond.
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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.
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Deaf-friendly video of the only thing in the WORLD that’s as cute as baby meerkats.
My website has started off the new year by breaking in a puzzling way. All the widgets on my homepage that are created with PHP are gone. (This applies to individual post pages too.) At first I thought PHP was broken - but no, I was using my own PHP5, and I didn’t change anything. So I fell back on the Dreamhost install of PHP 4.4.2, and that didn’t fix it. I changed it to the Dreamhost install of PHP 5.1.2, which is a slightly newer version than the one I was using (5.0.9), but that didn’t fix anything either. What’s really weird is that my admin side is working fine, and other websites I run that use PHP are fine. A says that if I didn’t change anything, then Dreamhost must have - but I can’t figure it out. It seems like if it’s only affecting the produced version of my journal (and the actual layout is fine, that is also constructed by PHP, it’s just the widgets that aren’t working), then it must be something in the journal design? Right? Hello? I’m so confused.
Added: Also, when I made this post, WordPress asked me if I was sure I wanted to add this post. I said yes, and it posted, and it was fine. But now I’m thinking something is up with my WordPress (which is self-installed 2.0.4), so I’m going to upgrade…
Resolved: Holy crapola. Apparently all of my King Text widgets got set to not run PHP; I have no idea why I didn’t figure this out faster. I also discovered an issue with WP 2.0.5 that caused WordPress to ask me for confirmations for some things; it turns out this is related to FastCGI and can be fixed with the WordPress 2.0.5 Tuneup plugin.
This is a totally frivolous post. I was looking through the WordPress Theme Browser, and I made a list of themes I liked, so I’m posting that list here. They’re all free to download, so if you like them, go for it.
I just got through tagging the entries around Empress Wu’s death. Damn, that sucked. Much worse than tagging those around Toadstool’s death. I am going to need to go home and hug kitties big-time.
So I have tagged almost all of 2006 now. Tagging is not easy; as I mentioned it requires reading everything. It’s also been a bit of a pain because my site doesn’t like me opening so many windows on it at once; I keep getting timeouts trying to load edit pages. Only four more years to tag now.
Today is another woot-off, but I’ve had four meetings today and I missed the electronic sudoku game that would’ve been $10 shipped. Nothing else has been remotely tempting, really.
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 did it! Almost entirely by myself, with just a bit of help from Mark of Weblog Tools Collection, I widgetized my design. I now have 13 instances of the King Text plugin running, each containing the code from my original sidebar. I was not able to find a way around the problem of the title falling inside the widget, so I had to stick with modifying the plugin code, but the King Text plugin accepts both PHP and HTML so I can put whatever I like in there. If I want to add additional widget plugins, I will have to edit those too, but for now I got everything running how I want it.
I did have to make one sacrifice: the sidebars are now fixed-width rather than liquid. This is because the percent sign I was using for the liquid layout was getting tossed out by the PHP running on the plugin. It’s not a huge deal, I can always adjust the width if necessary, but it isn’t quite perfect.
But damn, I did what I want, how cool is that?!