5:08p.m. Geeky Sillyness

My boyfriend’s wireless router was on the fritz. It could not stay online for more then a few minutes at a time. A paperclip couldn’t fit in well enough to actually activate the reset button. So we went ahead and took it apart. As we suspected, the rest button worked and the router was in good shape although it did not have its casing. We found an old broken Dreamcast controller and got to work. For an hour’s worth of geeky fun and a couple of beers, it came out pretty nicely.

As for the site, it has been running on my first official WordPress theme. The code is valid, simple, and as semantically correct as I’m going to get without losing my mind. It is something I can be proud of and hopefully use as a template for new layouts. Next up: exploring TextPattern! Might take a nap first, though.

9:46p.m. Lists Are Fun

Lists are so much more fun to write. I’m not sure if it is a good thing or not, but most likely most of my posts will be in list format.

• I’m going to make a WordPress theme from scratch. Hacking a theme was great for learning about how WordPress works, but I want to make a cleaner and leaner theme that I can (hopefully) use as a basis for future layouts. I think it will make future layouts and possibly porting to another CMS much easier.

• I’m pretty sure after I make a clean theme I’m going to end up at least trying TextPattern on my machine. The whole sections concept is genius. I just wish there was a TextMate bundle for TextPattern designing. That would rock and totally help with the template tag learning curve. I don’t know if I’ll ever be sure about which CMS I like better.

• I am much more pleased with WordPress then I was expecting. I was really frustrated by its lack of tag or keyword support. I tried using Ultimate Tag Warrior but it changes the database and I’m still not sure how to get it to work with an external editor (specifically TextMate) without a bunch of hacking that could create nightmares when updating. It then occurred to me I could just cheat and call WordPress’s categories tags. That way I’m not making huge modifications to the database or making a mess with extra scripting. It is not ideal though.

• From my [limited] understanding, TextPattern has keyword support, and there is this plugin that works with the keyword support, so in theory it should work with xmlrpc and external editors out of the box (sweet!).

So yeah, thats what I’m going to do now. Woo!

6:12a.m. Lather Rinse Repeat ‘07 — So Fresh and So Clean

Well it has been almost a year, but Lather Rinse Repeat is back! Yay! Back with a new layout run on a new CMS.

I just finished. I am getting quite sleepy. This is not completely done, of course, but it is certainly close enough. It is messy and although it validated through the software I used, it probably won’t validate on the web yet. So, here it is, as buggy and messy as possible.

For no particular reason here is a [short] list of observations I have made while making the new incarnation of Lather Rinse Repeat.

• Since this was my first time working with WordPress, I started with the Hemingway Theme and essentially hacked it to bits.
• The WordPress TextMate Bundle made working with new template tags pretty much painless.
• TextMate, between its excellent support for Markdown, WordPress and blogging in general, has completely exceeded my expectations of a text editor.
• I used TextMate with Typo, but I never really looked into what it could really do. Boy, can it do a lot.
• WordPress is a lovely CMS with a wonderful community full of resources. Is it perfect? No. Are there somethings plugins don’t fix yet? Yes. Will there every be a perfect CMS? Probably not. Will I keep looking for it and talking about it? Of course.
• I do still want to learn more ruby and eventually do it all on rails again. Keeping a stable version of Typo that was capable of being easily updated was just too difficult to handle last year. WordPress is pretty good if you want to to be able to do plenty of customizing while keeping some sort of upgrade-ability. Or at least it seems to so far.

And there you have it, here is the quick and dirty ‘07 version of Lather Rinse Repeat. Close to a year delayed, and created in a week. More stuff to come. I’m off to bed, I have to go to the dentist in the morning. Teeth are important. Yes they are.