I finally — after the debacle in January — went back to Michael Heilemann’s Binary Bonsai, downloaded the 167 build of K2, unzipped it — backed up the MySQL databases and transformed Churbuck.com into a better looking place than the old 1.5 Kubrick which has held me together since 2003.
Then I decided to be done with the perpetual act of trashing my sidebar and converted to Widgets — which I still haven’t mastered but which at the very least give me some control in an Ajaxy way over what elements get displayed and which don’t. The header image I talked about late last week when I went scanner crazy on some old Cotuit photographs. I wish I had the time to get serious about CSS, but I know from keeping my HTML chops sharp in the 90s that such knowledge is wasted unless its practiced daily. Even so, the nerd manque within demands that I start getting dirty with code, be it page description, BASH shell commands, MySQL db structures …..
I think I need to set up a sandbox server and get really serious. This recent convalescence has given me a little time to steel wool the rust off of my techie talents, but nothing to the extent of the early 90s when I was beta-testing HotMetal Pro and Vermeer and turning down offers to write books about SGML …. sigh, now I worry about banner ROI and search engine optimization and other generic online marketing challenges.
I am further convinced that within 5 years we’ll see another revolution in site construction, management and display when the next Vermeer arrives to build a full WYSIWIG LAMP implementation out of the box. Do I think the average joe will become his own sysadmin? Never, but we’re still a very long way from having a content management system for the masses.
Bugs I’m detecting in K2– I can’t blog photos from within Flickr that will appear in Firefox. They are fine in IE but I am not fine in IE and I can’t figure out how to tailor the del.icio.us and Bloglines widgets to display my tags and blog roll. Time to move on to work related stuff. Migraines are gone. I don’t feel like I have morning sickness all day long, and I want to get back on the bike. More on that saga of how to convince an insurance company adjuster accustomed to pricing dented fenders on a Camry that yes, indeed, a person can be foolish enough to invest over $5,000 in a bicycle. The company thought they were dealing with a Huffy rider. Bah.