I accomplished my first post-switch goal today. Most of the old content and linkage resides where it should once more, and the theme generally matches what came before. I think it looks cleaner and snazzier now. Of course I would, though, wouldn’t I?

As I indicated yesterday, however, a considerable motivation for making the platform change was the ability to do fun and interesting new things with the website without actually becoming a programmer. To this end I’ve installed a few WordPress plugins which you can see and enjoy on the new Status page. I found the myStatus plugin while looking for examples of how WP’s standalone Pages feature works, and that led me to the incredibly-cool plugin modestly named “The Execution of All Things” as well as to a succession of last.fm plugins, one of which tried to break my site (fortunately EZ-Scrobbler works like a charm).

I need to bring over the old Tenchi Muyo Thumbnail Theater material, the NaNoWriMo ’02 excerpts (in later years I simply posted them in the main journal’s Art category) and decide what to do with my old “bio” page, but otherwise I’m done. Whew. Heck, I even cranked out some new rotator images to liven things up at the top of the page.

So here’s the new site, as finished as it’s likely to get, ready for me to play with, ready for you to enjoy. It looks a lot like the old site, but behind the facade lies code that makes me happy.

I bet you weren’t expecting this, were you?

Let me make one thing perfectly clear from the get-go: I loved Monaural Jerk. It let me do some fun, geeky things. I could, in theory, do almost anything I wanted to with it. Unfortunately, over the last few months I’ve felt increasingly trapped by what I wasn’t able to accomplish without taking the time to fully learn the PHP language. I may be a geeky sort of fellow, but that’s more involved than I really have time for anymore.

After many months of using WordPress for the anime site, as well as sporadic tinkering with the Portlandbloggers page, I decided that this is the platform I want to run with from here on out. (That is, until the next big thing comes along in a few years. I am a geek-dilettante, after all.)

The process of getting from point where-I-was to point where-I-am was, indeed, quite the learning experience. Starting with an import script from Monaural Jerk v0.43 to WordPress 1.5 graciously provided by Michael Alderete (who also helped with a lot of the debugging) and kludging in some dotcomments import code, I set to work finding all of the fiddly little bits that went wrong. This included such fun as misnamed variables, non-escaped apostrophes, mismatched database insertions and just plain pig-headed stupidity on my part. Oddly enough, considering that as of this very morning I’d all but given up on making the conversion work, I was surprised to manage two major breakthroughs in the space of an hour. And here we are!

Of course, now I need to get all of the fun extra bits from the old site back up and running on the new. Don’t worry, I haven’t abandoned the basic “look” of my website. I just need time to construct a working template that more-or-less matches the kludgey old stylesheet rig I was using before. That project is now on the top of the list. Cross your fingers, folks.

Welcome to Version 3 of greyduck.net. I hope you like it here.

I’ve spent most of the day dealing with out-and-out frustration. I’m experimenting with some website code for a project I have in mind, and while the bulk of the work turned out not to be too difficult (with some very good help), there’s one part of it that’s driving me bonkers.

I’m trying to get a few hundred small text files turned into entries in an existing database. Nevermind why, just understand that this has turned out to be non-trivial for a non-programmer type such as myself.

Ah well. You can’t win ‘em all, can you?

Dear Spike TV:

When, in the future, you want to air a two-hour video game awards show, please feel free not to include musical numbers by artists who bear no relevance whatsoever to any video game ever made. I understood your including of Four Bits, or Two Quarters, or whatever that rapper’s name is who has a game out with his name on it. I don’t like rap, but at least that made sense.

Def Leppard, however, looked truly pathetic and had absolutely no business being there. Wow. Their performance served only as a bitter reminder that those of us who grew up with rock bands of that vintage are getting along in years.

The less said about Missy Elliot and her dancers, the better. Trust me.

So please, in the future, consider the tortured psyches of the audience you’re trying to reach with a shindig like the one you put on a while ago (and later televised). Your parade of (generally) relevant presenters was about as good as one would expect. The overall quality of the show was good, albeit appropriately cheesy given that it was an awards show, let alone one about video games. The music sucked, though. There’s no two ways about it.

Won’t someone please think of the gamers? Thank you.