So I’ve downloaded and tried out Chrome. It’s cute. It renders well. It might be a teensy bit faster on app heavy sites. It does not, however, have all my must-have Firefox plugins (speed dial, ad blocker plus, stylish, greasemonkey, etc…) and therefore I will not be switching my browser default.

I’m not sure who Google’s target audience is for this. Folks who use google apps a lot? Multimedia developers? Kids who want the latest shiny toy? If they’re trying to woo over the Firefox crowd they’ll have to address plug in compatibility, as I’d say most heavy firefox users have at least one plug in you’d need to pry from their cold dead motherboard. IE users, of course, are the low hanging fruit - but if they haven’t jumped ship for Firefox, why would they go for Chrome?

This service looks very interesting, and possibly a very good fit for one or two of my clients.

I think I just managed to get two wordpress loops running at the same time on my home page, without breaking the rest of the theme. Nifty.

Edit: Except the styling for the second loop is a bit off. Dangnabbit.
Edit2: Ha. Fixed it.
Edit3: And yet, it still won’t work exactly the way I’d like. Switching back to the old theme for the time being. Aarg.

Dear WP users-
The WP theme development community is mind boggingly huge, but you haven’t been able to find that one perfect theme that shows off your special snowflake-ness. And you whine that css is just too haaard to learn. And you don’t want to pay anyone else to make a custom theme for you.

My tiny violin, it is playing just for you.

No love,
me.

I’ve gone back and forth a dozen times between last night and now as to whether I want to shunt all comments to CreateSomething, or open both sites for commenting. This morning I was thinking both sites, ’cause I loathe that the default WP behavior is to have comments display flat, which I think discourages back and forth discussion, and I didn’t want LJ folks to have to jump though extra hurdles. (Let’s be honest here… I’m writing for a small audience here, and 98% of you are on LJ.)

It turns out, there are plugins to make my life happy. 1.) I can now accept OpenID data (username.livejournal.com), and 2.) I can now has threaded comments. Still leaving both sites open for commenting right now - will see how it works.

…eyes that interesting looking userpic-esque dohicky…

Just found a lovely plugin (LJXP) that lets me crosspost (easily) to CreateSomething and LJ and (I think) consolidate the comments in one spot.

Let me know if anyone has problems!

Since switching over to hostican, I’ve noticed that the amount of spam I’m getting has *plummeted*. From 100-200 pieces per day, I’m down to less than 20. My email address hasn’t changed, so I’m guessing that hostican’s spamblockers are just that good. Or something.

After installing wordpress three different times (do I want it in a subdirectory or the main root? What should the subdirectory be called? Do I want a static page as index, or the blog?) I’m now on to the mind numbing chore of importing about *five years* worth of hand coded blogging.

My solution? Open up my LJ XML export file and reverse-engineer enough of the schema (the LJ schema is a lot simpler than the wordpress native format) so I can slug the old posts into a ready for auto import XML file. (The only headache here is correctly coding the date/time tags) Then go though each post manually and set the category. For me, this is a lot simpler than just posting the content and trying to backdate.

It’s been noted in the past that I will, without fail, find the most complex method to do anything. I seem to be wired that way.

Still trying to figure the most convenient method for cross posting…

I think I’m in danger of falling in *love* with WordPress.

As for *why* I’m doing all of this, especially since I’m pretty brand loyal when you get down to it, and Pair hasn’t exactly screwed me over over the years…. well, I want to play with some toys. Specifically, wordpress, which I’m considering switching to for the bulk of my blogging. While I could certainly do this with Pair, they don’t make it that easy and while their low level services are affordable, the pricing skyrockets if you want to play with php or cgi - things it really wouldn’t kill me to work with a bit more.

As it just so happens, my yearly billing cycle with pair is up in a few weeks, so if this pans out, I just won’t renew with them. And if hostican blows? I switch the DNS back and avail myself of their 30 day refund.

::some time passes::

Wow. I have a working wordpress blog, and I’ve exported about 10 months worth of LJ posts directly into it. Now all I have to do is customize the theme so it looks like my site and not a generic template. (It’s about the time of year when I start thinking about re-skinning the site anyway.) Also, need to figure how to post using Semagic (which I have become pretty fond of).

Would you believe less than a year ago I was still hand coding all of my blog posts *and* the rss feed that went along with it? This is much nicer.