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.

If anyone’s trying to email me for the next day or so, I’d recommend sending to juliekarasik at gmail dot com - my email account transfer will probably go off without a hitch… but I also believe in Murphy’s Law.

This journal might look wonky for part of the evening - I’m switching hosting providers and didn’t think the DNS switch would propagate *quite* as quickly as it did. Wow.

This being a DNS switch, YMMV.

Why embed the LJ into my website when I can make the LJ look (almost) exactly like my website? I win.

And also, am now very tired of wrangling CSS. (Although there are still some tweaks to be made.)

I’ve been working on that pesky “I want to control every part of my website but I also want the freedom of a normal posting client” problem for literally years. I think I’ve finally found a solution that will let me post seamlessly though LJ (for art and thinky thoughts) and del.icio.us (for random links), mirror the results on my website, and not break my past archives or my brain.

It will probably mean that the old CreateSomething .rss feed will be depreciated, but even my control freak-ness has been getting tired of updating two files by hand every time I want to post.

That solution’s name, by the way, is Feed Digest, and I’m thinking it might just rock.

It finally happened, obviously. I don’t know if I’m 100% happy with it or not, but I think it’s growing on me.

Something I’ve noticed - once I dove into CSS and standards compliance, it’s gotten nearly impossible to prototype a new site look entirely in photoshop. I know a lot of folks who still do it that way, but I’ve found it’s easier just to dive in and start yanking the css file around rather than come up with an image protype that I may or may not be able to produce with the code.

These days, the process goes something like this:

• I decide I’m tired with the current color scheme.
• I use photoshop or Tim Luoma’s color chart to find a base color I want to try out. This time, obviously, it was blue.
• I do a global search and replace to pop in the new hex value - this will normally take care of the color values for all the different header text. (It should be noted that I almost never play around with the color for body text or body background, and that my default combo of verdana/georgia hasn’t failed me yet.)
• Assuming the new color actually works, I use photoshop to work out complementary values that I use for the sidebar, callout blocks, and other colorful bits.
• I play around with element positioning and decoration if necessary. (Links now have a custom image for underlines - don’t know if I’ll keep it or not.)
• Lastly, I start playing with graphics. Until this last redesign, I only hooked background images into the existing bits of code - but on this last go ’round I added a few extra placeholder divs so I could pop a few more images than I was able to use before. (Though I do hope that someday I’ll be able to hook multiple background files onto a single element and avoid the minor cruft I have to use to get this effect right now.)

Wheee! I did it! Got me my very own validated newsfeed. Now to decide what I’m goung to do with the damm thing. :)

And, seeing as I’ve got a whole weekend with lousy weather and an empty apartment, I might as well try and teach myself how to roll an RSS feed.

Here goes nothing…

There’s been a lot of discussion on WD-L lately about liquid vs. fixed layouts. So, just for a lark, I thought I’d give it a try here. (Not that it involved much more than killing a few width declarations.)