I’m still uncertain about the header; it may change yet, but I’m pretty happy with the rest. Do let me know if you find anything weird. (I mean, things I’ve overlooked, not things you don’t like.)

So the twittery updates have started bugging me; I’m going to test out the daily digest option for a few days, and if that still bugs me, I’ll move to the sidebar option.

That’s thing one. Thing two is that I’ve decided I’m officially getting old. How I know this is that this teeny little font is bugging the hell out of me. So I think there may be a CSS redesign in my relatively near future (as soon as I’ve gotten enough real work done that I can justify some goofing off, that is). Stand by, as there’ll no doubt be bumps along the way.

I’ve edited my feeds (RSS, RSS2, RDF, and atom) such that posts generated by the Twitter Tools plugin are excluded from my feeds. Let me know if you spot anything odd…

What I was tinkering with yesterday was Twitter Tools, a plugin for WordPress that connects your blog and your Twitter account, allowing you do a range of things like have your twitterings (I really can’t bring myself to use the word “tweets”) appear in your sidebar, notify Twitter when you post something to the blog, etc. What I’ve done is create a special category, “twitter,” which gathers my twitterings and posts them to the front page, but in a special format that sets them a bit apart. I’m going to let this run a while and see how I feel about it; if it’s too annoying, I may move to a daily digest posting.

Now to pretend to real productivity.

Doing a bit of tinkering in the background here, so things may look a bit odd at moments. Carry on.

We were down for a few hours in the early a.m., PDT (around 1 p.m. ish here) for some site maintenance, which I got a little carried away with. All seems okay now, but let me know if you encounter any weirdness, okay?

I swore I wasn’t going to miss it this year, as I did last year and the year before (and the year before that, and the year before that). I even went so far as to put it on my iCal, so that I’d remember to mark the occasion, but then I failed to look at the calendar yesterday. It’s a bit disappointing. I mean, this was moderately significant: the five year anniversary of starting things up here at Planned Obsolescence. I’d meant to mark the moment, but as wonky as my moment-to-moment understanding of what moment it is has gone, it’s not surprising that I missed it.

In any event, to mark the just-having-passedness of the moment: I’ve instituted a little “Five Years Ago” link, to be found at right. I’m curious what will happen on a day when, five years before, there was no post, but I guess we’ll see.

I’m tinkering a bit with my categories, trying to make them a bit more tree-like, but given that I’ve already got two systems represented here (the old tripartite novels/networks/inbetween structure and the more recent whatever-occurs-to-me structure), they’re not organizing terribly well. In any case, several of the categories at right expand when clicked upon, in particular “life,” “media,” “technology,” and “work.” But I’m dissatisfied, as some of the subgroupings are uncomfortable. Is “reading” really a child of “media”? (For me it is, which may say something about which way the wind is blowing in my academic affiliations.) But is “blogging” better considered “media” or “technology”? Or “work,” or “life,” for that matter? How did I end up with both a “blogging” and a “metablogging” category? Wouldn’t a blog post labeled “blogging” automatically be an instance of metablogging? In which case a blog post that consciously labeled itself “metablogging” would be, in fact meta-metablogging?

Sigh. More changes under the hood are afoot, though one hopes they’ll be pretty subtle.

The transition to WordPress has thus far gone fairly well, and what you see is roughly the site you’ll see once I’m done. However, I’ve got one significant problem that’s going to require me to go offline briefly this morning, I think: I originally installed WP via a one-click install in my testing subdomain (new.plannedobsolescence.net), and once I was ready to go, changed the installation’s options to reflect the proper URL and moved all the files to the top-level domain (plannedobsolescence.net). For whatever reason, though, WP in this new location seems not to think that I’m the owner of the files. The permissions are set identically to the permissions in the “new” subdomain, but I keep getting funky “if this file were writable, you could edit it” messages from WP, which suggests that something’s wrong. I’m about to attempt a backup and reinstall, so if things go away briefly… well, hopefully they’ll be back.

mod_rewrite is determined to kill me. Here’s what I managed to figure out: I can use mod_rewrite to rewrite my URLs from

http://www.plannedobsolescence.net/index.php?/weblog/post_name

to

http://www.plannedobsolescence.net/post_name.

And I can, theoretically, use another set of rewrite rules to replace the underscores with hyphens. And then at least many of my inbound links should transfer to the new WordPress permalink scheme.

But!

I couldn’t make it work to save my life. It has taken me much of the day yesterday, and most of the day today, with lots of back and forth with someone on my hosting provider’s forums, to get part one of the rewriting — eliminating the “index.php?/weblog/” chunk — to work. I’m not getting much of anywhere with the rewriting of underscores to hyphens.

One begins to wonder how much trouble is really worth it.