wordpress internals

one of the things that i missed about pMachine, my old blogging tool, was that it would take any links in my posts and force them to open in a new window. i always thought that was cool because i hated having to enforce that in the HTML.

it started to really annoy me and i talked to adam about it and he said that writing a plugin for that kind of behavior seemed to be the way to go. and wouldn’t you know it, it is really that easy.

so i wrote my first wordpress plugin. the more i use wordpress, the more impressed i get by it.

i did have to finally hack at the internals, though. i didn’t like the format of the comment notification emails sent to us and so i had to do a little tweaking there. it’s too bad that the emails sent to the user aren’t templatized as well.

erasure?

i used to be a big erasure. huge. i remember back in high school and when called me up the night before the release of the i say, i say, i say album and told me that a certain CD store had it on sale at midnight or something and we just HAD to go and get it.

so we did.

that was probably the last great erasure album i bought. ever since then, it’s been a bit of a disappointment. maybe cowboy was ok, i did go to that concert, but i don’t know…something about erasure these days that doesn’t really excite me.

but i did not know that the new erasure album nightbird was out until warren mentioned it on his blog. i quickly decided to check out the album and i’ve finished listening to it once and so far, i’m pretty unimpressed. i’m going to give it another listen now, but so far, no good.

how do you deal?

everybody deals with personal grief in their own ways. for some, when the going gets tough, they run. i used to run. i used to run away from any and all of my troubles, hoping that it would just go away if i avoided them long enough. but these days, it seems like the way in which i deal with harder times is by closing my heart to the issue.

recently, i’ve gone through some pretty tough times, and there have been many times where i feel like i’m not equipped to handle it. sometimes i just completely break down and there’s nothing i can do to regain my composure but to let it run its course and hope that it will end soon.

i think that i just close my heart, let the pain that it has suffered dwell in its own private misery and hope that after enough time has passed that it will heal on its own. it used to be that i used to wear my heart on my sleeve. it was obvious how i felt, what was going on with me, and there was just no question about it. i guess these days, i feel like i just can’t go on lamenting about my issues. it does no one else any good, and it certainly doesn’t make me feel any better.

sometimes talking about all the inner turmoil that’s brewing inside you just doesn’t do any good. all it does is agitate an already painful situation and then i’m left off worse than where i started off from.

i’ve been trying to figure out how to deal. do i surround myself with friends who can be there to comfort me? do i hermit myself away from the world? do i go wild and party it up and escape from the pain of it all?

i don’t know. i don’t know to deal, i guess i just have to figure it out.

consolation

this weekend, i met up with my old boss. we got caught up on each other’s lives and remininisced about the good old days. it was really good to be able to catch up with him and see how everything was going.

we then waxed philosophy about various things: career, dating, the future…you know, that sort of thing. and it was strange because even though i was looking for it from him, i had found great consolation in my conversation with him. some parts of the conversation made me sad, but overall, it was uplifting.

it’s interesting where one finds comfort in trying times, though. sometimes you need not seek it, it will just find you.

bad, bad server issues

so it turns out that i had some pretty bad server issues over the weekend and the amount of work that is required to get things back up and running is a little overwhelming.

i decided to take the opportunity to upgrade the server and start from scratch. yay…sort of. new version of linux, new database, new web server, new …well, everything. the problem is that i now have waaay too much data to upload if i wanted to upload everything that was on the server. but for now, i’m tarring up my web root to see how bad that’ll be. it’s taking FOREVER.

man…i wish that i had better backups. oh well. some of the auxilary sites are back on the site, but my stuff is just going to take forever. i’ve resigned to that. but i’m going to enforce some clean up for some of the users on my box. i’m not going to upload all this crap back if no one uses it. =P

it’s embarassing, but my old server was an AMD K6-2 333Mhz with 192MB of ram. i had forgotten how old that server was, but it was running my stuff just fine. the new server isn’t anything to write home about, but it’s a little bit faster.

i’ve also decided to switch to wordpress. the new version looks promising, and i was getting sick of pMachine, anyhow. the big question now is whether or not i write some kind of database import util to import the old blog entries into this one…decisions, decisions.

oh yeah, and this is the default theme for wordpress. not shabby, i guess…but i really need to design something new. looks like the next few weeks are going to be pretty busy…

oh yeah..and my email doesn’t work yet. dammit.

gorging on food

yesterday for lunch i had:

  • beef teriyaki and california roll bento box
  • unagi hand roll
  • ebi tempura hand roll
  • rock n roll
  • california roll
  • white tuna roll

    today for lunch i had:

  • 2 insanely large tacos
  • beef and chicken nachos

    man…i have been eating like there’s no tomorrow.

  • object dock

    i’m not sure where exactly i saw this, but yesterday i saw somebody talking about [url=http://www.objectdock.com]object dock[/url] and i have to say that i love it. i have ALWAYS loved OS X’s taskbar and have been eagerly awaiting for some kind of windows clone.

    you gotta hand it apple. in terms of GUI design, they have always been ahead of the game. it’s a good thing that for us windows folks people are out there to steal apple’s innovations so we can all enjoy in the fruit of their labor.

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