I tried out several new themes out over the last couple of days, but this one’s the winner: Mandingo. It sports a 1024x display option, the ability to use two or three columns, two options for banner height, a built in banner image rotation mechanism, and plenty more bells & whistles besides. What’s more, all of them can be managed from its options page, integrated with the WordPress admin interface. I don’t have to fiddle directly with the theme code at all. People, this is sexy. Oh, and it actually displays my category hierarchy correctly! No matter how hard I fought with the old theme I just couldn’t make that work. Oy.

So. All I have to do now is… er… build a whole new library of rotator images. Ahem. I’m long overdue for working on the rotator images libraries anyway, so some extra incentive doesn’t really hurt.

(A note to my WordPress clientèle: If you’re interested in a conversion to Mandingo I can make it happen in a jiffy. Mari, especially, would benefit greatly from the upgrade to a theme which supports modern WordPress code and features.)

My hosted server rebooted spontaneously some time around 7am Pacific Time. I’m not absolutely certain but I believe that this has to do with DNS problems at the hosting facility causing massive churn in the mail processing chain. Infinity Internet is still working on the problems (it looks like a complex cascade-failure situation, partly resolved as of this writing) and Duckpond is ticking along on a borrowed nameserver setting.

To torture-test the newly-restarted machine, I decided to upgrade greyduck.net to WordPress 2.5. So far only one of the important plugins gave me any trouble, and that was remedied with a one-minute hack to the plugin code. (The LJ crossposter, if you’re wondering.) Almost all of the updates seem to be in the admin interface and the backend code, not in the frontend or the database structure itself.

The admin interface looks very different, it’s true. I don’t actively dislike it, and I’ll probably get used to it. Such is the way of things.

Every time I do one of these upgrades I think about getting a new theme. Is now the time, do you figure?

First, I wasn’t going to post anything so I could goof off and listen to music. Someone on my LJ friends list requested a mix tape disc archive and I figured I should get my brain percolating on ideas for what to include.

Then, I thought I should work on a playlist for a new music mix post, since I’ve been pondering making more of those. Even though nobody seems to like them much, hey, it’s my damned site and I’ll post music mixes if I jolly well feel like it. So there, and stuff.

Once I started assembling the playlist, I had a brainstorm. The brilliant idea will require a fair bit of additional work, but I figured I could do that on Thursday night and have the setup all done tonight.

Finally, I got carried away and assembled the first part of the project tonight. I’d just post the silly thing… but my computer’s still saving the compressed mixdown file, and I need to get to bed.

Ahem.

So, some time between now and bedtime on Thursday I should have at least half of the silly project posted. Watch for it, won’t you?