In the interests of usability, the search form no longer shows gray text in a gray box on a gray background when you type into it.

You’re welcome.

In other news, the RSS/RDF/whatever feed now consists of the entry summaries rather than the full text. This more-or-less emulates what the previous system used to do. If you don’t like it, now would be a good time to say so. (My possible solution to an uprising might involve providing multiple feeds. I’m not sure yet.)

While I’m on that subject, I suppose now is a rather late date to point out that the feed URL has changed, so if you use a feed reader to keep tabs on me, you’ll want to re-add the subscription to this site. We apologize for the inconvenience.

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.