BeMused

Lots of work to do around here, fixing links, putting my buddies back in the sidebar, tweaking the layout. But I have to say, after only a few days of playing with Word Press, I like it so much better. There were things that irked me about pMachine, things I’ve found that have been addressed in Word Press. For instance, when creating an entry, in both pMachine and Word Press, you have something called “quicktags” at the top of your entry field. These quicktags simply allow you to format your text (bold, italics, put a link in, etc.) in a quick manner. With pMachine, you had to select the quicktag you wanted before putting in the text. After it put the tags in, then you put your mouse between the tags and typed. With Word Press, you just highlight the word you want formatted and then select the button, similar to most word processors out there. It puts the necessary tags in place and off you go. Wonderful. This allows me to type along with my thoughts, and then go back and format as I see fit, a lot easier than pMachine ever did.

Setup was also a breeze. I changed the necessary config file, put in the name of my blog and my email on the first install page, and after selecting “next”, it created the database tables and that was it. Nothing hard at all. Lovely.

I think I’m truly going to love Word Press. I still have bits n’ pieces to figure out, but one of the other bonuses is the huge Word Press community.

So hang with me as I try and get this place back to order. Moving into a new space always includes a lot of un-packing and re-arranging while getting things juuuusst right.

Ok, so I’ve decided to make the jump to WordPress for a few different reasons, the most pressing one being that WordPress is still being worked on, while pMachine (my previous blogging software) has been sunsetted at version 2.4. If I wanted to continue, I had to move over to Expression Engine, but I wasn’t willing to pay the $99 bucks for it, no matter how cool it looks.

So, over to Word Press. I was very impressed with how easy it is to set up, but I’m having a hell of a time getting the importer script to work. Admittedly, it’s beta, but it did grab my entries. Now I’tm just working on getting the archives, categories and comments working correctly.

For now, I’m just using the default theme. Once I get the rest of the guts working, then I’ll start playing with creating a new template.

-edit-

Using the information found here, I had managed to get to the above state: where my archives were working fine, but the rest of it was acting wonky. Well, deleting the placeholder html file I created seem to fix it all. If anyone sees any problems, please let me know!

Because our anniversary always falls on or around Thanksgiving, the wife and I decided to celebrate it this summer instead, so last night we went and saw Chris Isaac at Wolf Trap last night, and dubbed it our “Twelve and three-quarters” anniversary.

Chris Isaac puts on an awesome show, with lots of crowd favorites and a lot of audience interaction. He came out into the crowd and walked about four feet away from us. I thought the wife was just going to faint away in a swoon. She loves Chris Isaac, and afterwards, she got an autograph and a handshake. Unfortunately, I only had the camera phone and took a crappy picture (that’s still on the phone), but she was all smiles and it made her night, so all was good.

The opening act was a lady named Aslyn, who reminded me of a blond, bouncy Tori Amos. Not her in style of music, more like her style of playing the piano. She’s all over that piano bench when playing, and really gets into the music. She was a blast.

Did y’all miss me?

{crickets chirp, pins drop}

Well, no matter. I had an incredible time. I took over 400 pictures and managed to write down enough journal entries to help myself remember, so hopefully, shortly, I’ll have a trip report complete with pictures to enthrall you all with!

So, stay tuned.