eating cucumbers without permission...

Finally.

I wanted to start over. A clean slate, running code I can edit, styles I can easily fill up with stupid features and security holes. Not at all like a slate, in fact (I am unaware of any scripting languages for metamorphic rock), but a new beginning. My old posts will stay where they are, and here, I hope, I’ll never need to be reminded of them again.

Why WordPress?

First I tried Blosxom (I love the “flavours“), but abandoned it for some reason or other. I’d always had an irrational hatred of Movable Type, preferred something not written in line noise, and was inclined towards a free-as-in-speech solution either way. For the record, I settled on WordPress over TextPattern completely on the basis that post URIs didn’t need to contain the post ID.

With that ringing endorsement out of the way…

About This Site

It’s taken me many months to get to this stage. It wouldn’t have, but I’m fickle. And a perfectionist. And had only a casual acquaintance with PHP specifically, or programming in general. Although Wordpress out-of-the-box is perfectly usable, if with a hideous default theme, I wanted all the cool toys; if they didn’t exist, I had to write them.

I learned about Markdown and I fell in love; it’s not that all markup becomes instantly simple, but it looks better, so much better, than raw HTML. Append “.text” to the end of this post’s permalink URI, or any post’s, to see the raw version.

Incidentally, that’s hack #1, based on something similar at DaringFireball. The changing subtitle at randomWalks was #2; that meant a whole ‘nother weblog and yet another plugin. The photobar at the top of the page has so far been implemented at least five times. Every time a post is made, it’s rebuilt out of fragments of random photos from my gallery. (Each fragment used to link to the actual photo, but most of those images are no longer public.)

The linklog first used Markku Seguerra’s wp-recent-links plugin, then a modified version of it, then Photomatt’s “asides“, then a full WordPress install; now it’s using wp-recent-links again, albeit renamed and mostly rewritten. I hope at some point to make up my mind.

Now it’s done, or near enough, and it’s so terribly anticlimactic.