So I finally go around to applying the 2.5.1 Upgrade to the website. My usual procrastination once the major release came out (in this case 2.5) was rewarded, as I was able to go to the point release that fixed any of the minor little bugs that may have crept in. I was in a rather crappy mood last evening, so I decided to change the theme over as well.

You know, the upgrade part was pretty painless. The theme change…..well, that was a bit higher up on the pain scale. I’ve probably spent around 4 hours on this and I still have a few minor changes to make (such as seeing if this post a) actually makes it up to the web and b) actually gets displayed correctly), but for the most part things have settled. Once again I am reminded why I am not a graphic artist; my work on the title graphic took me about 90 minutes of swearing and searching of the internet. Larry - a design guy I used to work with out in California - probably would have had it done in 5 minutes.

Widgets are another new addition - all the sidebar elements are now widgetized. I’m not entirely happy with the way things look, but now I can drag and drop the elements around instead of recoding them. Which should make things easier. The only issues on the sidebar are the search button - the widget version looks like hell because it wraps - and the new book manager. The old Amazon Media Manager plugin isn’t a widget (or at least not that I could see), so I abandoned it in favor of the new widget over to the right there. Time will tell if it works for me.

As always, cheers to the wordpress team on a great release.

Another painless upgrade - about the only thing that would make this easier is if I could hit a button and have the software do it all itself. Of course, there probably is a plugin out there somewhere that would do that for me - I just haven’t had the time to find it, test it, and install it yet. To be honest, it’s not that big of a priority - I’ve gotten the whole upgrade process down to a science of late. This includes the very anal multiple backups that I take before replacing things on the live site (you can never have enough backups), proceeds through file uploads in Transmit, and ends in this test post through Ecto.

The fact that this post made it up and onto the site is a pretty good indication that things are working fine. Now if I could only manage to find the time to convert my theme and plugins over to versions that support all of the neat new features in version 2.3 I’d be a happy man. However, something tells me it will be a few months before I get to that.

Once again, cheers to the wordpress team - their software just works.

Well, I just jumped on the Wordpress 2.3 bandwagon. After waiting forever to get up to version 2.2 I waited a mere 23 days to go to this revision. Of course, this has less to do with me trying to stay on top of things and more with me trying to find something else to do while I bang my head against the wall working on a fairly convoluted, involved, and rather messed up (to get all technical) program here at work.

Seriously though, as always this upgrade was mostly painless - the only issue I had was with my content directories, and the only reason I had that particular problem was due to the fact that I inadvertently overwrote the directories when I was uploading the new version. No worries, though. I quick restore of a few directories from backup and life is good once again.

Kudos and thanks once again to the folks at Wordpress.org for putting out such an excellent program.

I just finished updating my Wordpress installation to version 2.2. This upgrade has been somewhat slow for me - on my hard disk I have at least three different versions of Wordpress since 2.0.2, none of which have made it up to my web host.

So this evening I bit the bullet and started to go through the upgrade process during commercials while I watched the Cavs game.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised anymore, but damn did this upgrade go smooth! Not only does the team at Wordpress turn out great software, they also manage to put together a brain-dead simple upgrade procedure and very well written documentation.

As of right now, all my plugins seem to be working fine. All of my posts are showing up fine. Now all that’s left to do is post this piece through Ecto to make sure that part works. I’m not too worried.

Not wanting to sound too gushing, but I can’t say enough about the Wordpress development team. Their hard work enables me to spend less time managing my blog and more time writing on it.

Now to get back to that writing bit….

The concept that you are writing something that is viewable by the entire online world can be daunting if you stop and think about it. Anyone - your wife, your mistress(es), your children, parents, boss - have the ability to type in your URL and in a brief span of time confirm that you are indeed a total doofus. I was thinking about this while out riding today due indirectly to a conversation with a friend via email the other day.
Appearances to the contrary, I’ve always been a fairly shy person - interacting with people has always been somewhat awkward and painful for me. But it has always been something that I have forced myself to do because for the most part, it is enjoyable.

My intent on registering the psychoticpineapples.com domain was two-fold; first, I intended to create a site that I could upload audio and video files of my old high school band for friends to download. Secondly, I wanted to create a site where I could publish the commentaries, stories, jokes, and such that I am (for better or worse) known for.

So full of high hopes I set everything up three years ago. And then, things stagnated. There is something in my personality that won’t let me do something unless I’m 100% sure of the outcome beforehand. That means that everything I wrote would just have to be perfect. So, at least half a dozen times over the first year of this site’s life I would go through the same process:

1. Write up a blog post.
2. Re-read.
3. Rip apart and rewrite.
4. Return to step #1.

The problem wasn’t just that I was a perfectionist - it was that I was a self-concious perfectionist. I would start to write…and then start to obsess over it. Does this sound stupid? Is this too weird? Am I just an idiot? Then I would go back and edit things, be happy for 5 minutes, and then go through the same process again. Finally, I would just push it aside for “later” which turned into “never”.

What finally enabled me to get over this were two very important (and, in retrospect very obvious) truisms:

• No matter what you do, someone is always going to complain about it or find fault with it.
• No matter how great or wonderful what you manage to accomplish, most people really don’t give a rat’s ass.

With these two thoughts in my mind, I took a deep breath, dashed off a quick post about Alex, and uploaded it to the site.

Then I did it again a few days later.

After a bit it became easy to write, just difficult to go through the gyrations to get the content to the web. And after I adjusted the way I do things using Ecto and WordPress even that became simple.

Blogging now has taken on more importance for me - first and foremost it is another way for me to communicate with my friends and family, but there are also other aspects to the process. It provides an important creative release for me, it lets me work on my writing in a very non-threatening environment, and it gives me a chance to express myself about different topics that I come across in my life.

Then there is the icing on the cake, so to speak. About a month or so into this I started to get emails and trackback links from other bloggers and friends. One of my friends found a post about him on my blog via a search engine and sent me a comment. I’ve also noticed an increase in traffic to my site.

So no fear or obsessiveness here now. Just trying to have fun.

Oh…and about those audio and video clips. They’ll be up on the site real soon now…..really…..