I missed the 15 year anniversary this February because I was busy with family visiting and then COVID-19 happened and next thing I knew it was the end of July and I was realizing just how long this site has been around. The crazy thing is that in my first blog post on this blog, I wasn’t even sure I’d stick with it. Yet here I am, with a blog that’s essentially been with me for my entire post-college life. While I started off with the generic Wordpress theme, 15 years ago in July I had the following theme:

If Audio Embeds Aren’t Working For You, check out this support thread in which I figured out what was going on.

I first blogged about Wordpress 3.6 in April. I was extremely excited about the new Post Formats UI and the new theme Twenty Thirteen. At the time there was a month left before the release. Then, things got pushed back a bit which messed with my image formatting. Then, at some point, they decided they would have to remove the Post Formats UI for this release. And then they went silent. Weeks passed; a month passed. When they mentioned Post Formats and the new Multimedia features - embedded video and audio - it sparked a creativity in my brain - a way to use the site that would make use of what was unique about the web rather than just being a public journal. And I haven’t known when I could schedule these posts or even write them because after the Post Formats UI decision, they stopped updating the releases section of the website. Look, I’ve been involved with FLOSS software for about a decade now. I know all about the Release when It’s Done method, aka The Debian Way. It tends to lead to better quality releases (keyword: tends). But it also causes a lot of frustration - hence the reason for the Ubuntu fork. Really, all I wanted (and based on a few comments I’ve seen on the web from people who use WP to make a living - designing or writing training materials) was some communication. I understand that you might not know exactly how long it would take to untangle the Post Formats UI from the code. But an estimate would have been better than nothing.At least we’d know you cared what we think. And that’s just human psychology. It’s the reason why all the theme parks have signs telling you how long the wait is going to be for any particular ride. If you know it’s going to be an hour you aren’t as pissed as if it takes an hour and you had no idea. So next time, keep us in the look, Wordpress.

Happy 10 years of the software that allowed me to free myself of the shackles of other corporations and take blogging into my own hands.  I started this blog almost around the same time as Wordpress (WP was only 1.5 years old) Here’s to another ten years! And, here’s my version of what Dougal suggested:

When I first started using Wordpress in 2005:

• I was in my 20s
• I was in college
• I was running the blog on Fedora Core
• I was engaged
• I was using Facebook heavily as it was still highly focused on college students
• I’d never been to any country outside the USA other than Canada
• President George W Bush was in his second term
• The USA was at war with Iraq and Afghanistan

Now, when Wordpress turns 10 in 2013:

One day last week I was a little bored at lunchtime so I started clicking on the Wordpress Dashboard links to different developer blogs.  Turns out Wordpress 3.6 is coming out soon and it’s going to focus on bringing post formats to the fore and creating a consistent way of handling them within the database. I had no idea this was introduced back in Wordpress 3.1. I don’t know if I missed the notification or if it didn’t mean anything to me because I hadn’t used Tumblr yet. Here are two great explanations: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/post-formats/ and http://wpdaily.co/future-post-formats/ . If you don’t feel like reading those, basically think of how when you make a post on Tumblr it asks you if it’s an image, post, link, etc. That determines the interface it gives you and, depending on your Tumblr theme, determines how to present the information you put into it. Given that one of the post formats is Annotation (meant to be a short post) and given that I quickly grew tired of Tumblr and how it doesn’t have a proper commenting system, I’m probably going to use that for shorter, less fleshed out posts rather than having a Tumblr blog.

So, Wordpress 2.7 is finally here.  It’s their second visual refresh in a year and I have to say they have really outdone themselves.  When they did the last change, I thought “wow, there’s no way they could improve on this.” and “I thought their old interface was good, but this makes it look like a pile of crap!”.  But now I feel the same way all over.  There are a few things that aren’t where I remember them, but overall, I am loving the new work they’ve done.  There’s just one thing that annoys the heck out of me - the new threaded comments don’t work with my theme.  I’m going to either have to figure out how to redesign it on my own or switch themes again.  But I really like this theme and I’ve done so much customization already.

Other than widgets, I think that tags are the best feature of Wordpress 2.3. Up until now I kept adding more and more categories and things were starting to get ridiculous. But now with tags I have a wonderful middle path. Categories are for broad swaths of posts and there shouldn’t be too many. (Or at least not any more than I currently have) But now, instead of making a new category to talk about Compiz or X11, I can just file it under Linux and add the corresponding tags. Plus, tag clouds are fun!

I’m getting a bit bored and my wrist is starting to hurt a little from operating the mouse so much. I’m not done recategorizing my blog posts, but I only have one year’s range left - March 2006 - March 2007. Hopefully that was a twelve month period in which I didn’t write too much. Boy-oh-boy did I learn my lesson about not backing up. Also, I was jumping from 2.1 to 2.3 so perhaps I was bound to run into those problems. Once I’m done with that, there are some pretty neat developments which have recently happened on vimeo as well as some exciting news on “Sugar” and “Trick or Treat”.

Finally upgraded to Wordpress 2.1 - I was waiting to make sure there weren’t any show-stopper bugs as there were in the previous version. So far no one seems to have found any problems. They didn’t do too many cosmetic changes because I can’t really tell what’s changed. I’ll have to review the changelog again. So far the BEST change is that “General” is not automatically selected as a category. It was annoying to uncheck that EVERY time!

I finally found out that all I need to do is to disable the WYSIWYG editor in Wordpress (which I hated anyway!) and now I can get my Vimeo clips embedded. Sure, I could point you to www.dropthebombproductions.com, but people tend not to like to leave their page if they don’t have to. I’d love to be able to embed video. Now I can!

As a celebration, here is one of my earliest videos, “Anime Hurricane”. (Follow the vimeo link to get more information on it)