Archive for August, 2009

Those who know me well are keenly aware that I am a heathen non-believer¹ when it comes to higher power type beings, but also know that I embrace the concept of karma – simply stated as what goes around comes around. Yesterday’s melt-down, I’ve come to believe, was no less than my just dessert, the karmic animal that turned ’round to bite me squarely in the butt.

Metaphorically speaking.

You see, it all started like this:

A few weeks ago I decided to migrate this blog to a different host – one that supports WordPress. I’d been using Blogger and my own custom template but finally got fed up with blogger’s bugs and lack of extensibility. I knew WordPress was a fairly decent CMS² and, of course, free.

My hosting service included WordPress in the price of hosting the blog and one click installed it. My next step was to redirect the DNS³. Actually, that wasn’t my next step – it was my first mistake.

TIP: when changing hosting services, do not redirect the DNS until everything is ready to go on the new server. IE: get the house built before you move in….

My second mistake was in thinking all I had to do was to replace Blogger template codes with WordPress template codes to get up and running. Nope. Not that easy. WordPress wants you to have a theme.

Thus began my decent into hell.⁴ Yes, it woud’ve been far easier to pick one of the bazillion free themes and go from there, but that would have meant giving up control – and, again, those who know me know control is not something I’m happy departing with.

I searched for theme producing tools, tried a couple on trial, then found one that looked like it’d be just the ticket. Now here comes the karma bit.

A lot of the tools out there that can help you put together web-pages, blogs, etc., offer “free” trials before purchasing. Not a bad deal – I’ve gone that route many times, buying some and not buying others.

I’ve also taken advantage of free trials when I knew I needed only limited use of the product. Such was the case with the software I found to help me generate a WordPress theme. I thought, “Okay, I’m only gonna need it for one theme, the trial is all I need…”

Cue ominous underscoring.

I downloaded the software and got to work. In no time, my theme was put together with only a tiny bit of tweaking in the css left to do. I hit export, tweaked, uploaded and….

Sheeyit. All of the images, gifs – my own imported header gif were stamped with the word “TRIAL” all over them.

That – pissed me off. Weh-heh-elllll. I wasn’t go to let that deter me. How dare they – do they know who they’re messin’ with here?

Obviously not.

Soooo, the next day – yesterday – I embarked on my one-upmanship. And this included getting WordPress on my local machine and enabling the localhost capabilities of my mac so I could preview the site build as I went.

Once I got set on that (which was surprisingly not hard – I won’t say it was easy breezy, but it wasn’t rocket science… did you know that the internet is a fount of information?), I downloaded another freebie – the image editor Gimp which is a down and dirty decent open-source substitute for Photoshop.

Then I was ready to go. I opened up the image folder in that marked up theme and, one by one, eliminated all the stupid “TRIAL” stamps from the images. I was very, very pleased with my self as the fruits of my labor replaced their tainted dopplegangers in the image folder.

All the little corners, the drop-shadowed borders, boxes, icons, backgrounds, all of those suckers were wiped clean and made fresh again. All by my hand. And mouse.

Finally, after about ten – thirteen hours of image repair and tweaking the template, the theme was ready for export and uploading to the site.

Again – I was very, very pleased with myself. I had thwarted the beast and won one for all of us open-source acolytes across the globe.

But there was one little tweak more I had to do before uploading to the host. The template name the software generated was ugly and cumbersome. I wanted it to be simple – the name of the blog only. I accessed the theme folder, renamed the file and refreshed localhost.

The blog home page was blank. I went back to WordPress admin – yup, the theme was still there, with the old name. Hmmmmm. What could be the problem? OH I know -

I needed to load the theme again and reactivate so the templates would refresh the association with the theme folder. No prob… let’s just get rid of the old theme via the WordPress admin page – “delete this theme”, yup, click that… done… buh-bye, and then re-loa… er, wait, what????

Where’s my theme?? WHERE’S MY THEME????

It was a few seconds of stunned disbelief before I accepted what I’d done. With one click, I eliminated a day’s work. With one click, karma had the last laugh… the last belly laugh… the last “hardy har-har, up yours, bitch” guffaw.

And then commenced the meltdown which produced yesterday’s post. Not a proud moment, I assure you.

Today, I turned it around. After work, I went to the theme generating software site, gave them my credit card number and bought the license for the software. They got my $49.95 and in under and hour, I got my WordPress theme and here I am, by golly.

<reset>Karma</reset>

I still have some tidying up to do as I get used to the new digs and learn what WordPress can and can’t do. Any tips on widgets and plugins would be most welcome.

Thanks for stopping by this little narcissistic corner of the interverse.

I am sitting here with weary tears streaming down my face. Why?

Beacause 13 hours of painstaking work building a wordpress theme for this stupid egotistical, self-centered craptastic shithole of a blog just disappeared in a single mouse click.

That’s why.

At this time ten years ago I was in my second month of living in my new house. The seven months of its construction had been filled with anxious anticipation, frustration, glee – a virtual roller-coaster of emotions culminating with me crouched on the fresh linoleum of my shiny new bathroom leaning over the rim of the ”virgin” toilet puking my guts out from sheer exhaustion.¹

Getiing this site up and running to my satisfaction in this wordpress thing is providing a bit of deja-vue. It’s proving to be quite a bit more difficult than anticipated. Really – why does this have to be such a bear? I just hope it doesn’t end with a repeat on the bathroom floor…

Wellll… this is turning out to be more of a project than I anticipated. Seriously – if anyone can guide me to the idiot’s guide for creating custom WordPress themes – I’d greatly appreciate it.

In the meantime, I’m gonna have some ice-cream.

I’ve made it the new house. Now it’s time for some redecoration. I hope to spruce up the place with much of it’s old flavor with the addition of some WordPress pizzazz. If anyone has some quick tips on converting a custom blogger template over to a WordPress theme, chime in. In the meantime, I’ll be burning some rubber over at Google for some advice.

Just in case there’s either of my readers strolls by in the near fulture and wonders where the blog is – I’m in the process of changing hosts (so I can scrap blogger and move to WordPress) – so Yesablog may be in limbo for a few days.

We’ll be back – and maybe even posting a bit more often!

Stay tuned!!

That rusty, scraping, nails-on-chalkboard sound you hear is the sound of my creative wheels attempting to unfreeze… A substantial amount of lubrication may be required to get this, me, this in motion.

I joined a group of people this summer who are making the daunting attempt to read the massive David Foster Wallace tome “Infintie Jest.” I bought a Kindle for the occasion and I have to confess: without it, I seriously doubt I would have gotten past the first chapter – again. You see – this is my second try.

I bought the door stop book shortly after it’s initial publication because a friend was reading it. At over a thousand pages, it’s size wasn’t intimidating; I rather like meaty literature. It was Wallace’s opening serve ¹ that caused me to put it down without attempting a return volley. Whut. The. Fuck.

A few months ago some of my internet friends were tossing around the idea of reading the book together. Not together together like reading in sync together – but at the same time, book-clubish ² together. It didn’t come to be until this summer when some good and brave folks out there decided to launch the Infinite Summer project. A few of us signed up, a forum for discussion was created and then…

Well, amongst each other, there hasn’t been much discussion. At least none that I’ve been party to. Which is okay, really, because more intimidating than reading the book is the idea of trying to Discuss It.

I’m just a speck of an insect floating on the top of the vast sea that is this book – not even my Kindle can define of most of the gold-plated words Wallace pulls out of his lexicon and his intellect is leaving vapor trails it’s so far over my head, for chrissakes.

But I am soldiering on. I’ve relied on our guides over at Infinite Summer to get my head under the surface. Thanks to them I’ve bruised my forehead with many a V-8 moment which has gotten me to the next chapter, and the next and the next.

I was also greatly relieved to be given permission to hate the novel – which I do, in part. ³ I’ve developed a dysfunctional relationship with the book. Apropos, I think, because the book is rife with and thrives on dysfunction. So I’m fully expecting to be thoroughly screwed over by the time I reach the end. But, as with any doomed relationship, I’ll lick my wounds and do my best to take the lessons learned on to the next literary affair.

I will say this – it is absolutely true that DFW makes you work – and work hard. IJ is not for the feint of heart or those looking for a breezy summer read. He has reminded me why I fell in love with books so long ago. The opportunity to visit the world of another’s creation – and especially one of an author like Wallace who is infinitely uncompromising ⁴ in his depiction of that world – is an opportunity to deepen my relationship to and understanding of my own world.

And in this new era of 140 character weedy snippets threatening to choke our already shortened attention span, IJ is a welcome return to whole days spent reading, exercising nearly atrophied brain-cells and going on an adventure with a great mind and talent. How sad, indeed, that this one is tragically gone from us forever.

If you love literature and haven’t done so already, you owe it to yourself to settle in with the IJ experience. Truly.