Stephanie Leary

Writer and WordPress consultant

Public redesign in progress. Please pardon the mess.

midweek flyby

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I’ve been feeling pretty icky, mostly because I was unexpectedly in the presence of cats all weekend. I really need to learn to ask about that before I visit new places, as sad as that is. So the writing weekend wasn’t so productive, but I did get one good idea that’s been spinning nicely this week. I’m resurrecting the short story that goes with the desert books, but I haven’t decided whether to leave it as a short story or move it into the first book as a subplot. I’m leaning towards subplot, but I’m not sure I can make the timeline work.

Either way, the important thing is to get it written.

I’ve been playing with WordPress at work, and my God, I feel like I’ve fallen into a river of geek cool. I might just have to switch this blog again. Having trouble with the TextPattern importer, though.

Tonight is TV night, tomorrow we work on the bookshelves.

Last night Delicious Library, which has been crashing on startup for two weeks, suddenly and inexplicably began recovering my hosed library file. At first I was encouraged, but then I noticed that it was importing multiple copies of each book—like 8—along with other books that I don’t own and have never heard of. Finally I realized that it was reading Amazon’s “similar items” recommendations as books I own. I ended up with multiples of multiples… say you have Harry Potter 5. HP 1-4 is recommended, right? Except that when you import HP1, now 2-5 are recommended, and now those have been imported again… It’s a huge mess. I deleted all the multiples and books I don’t really have (on the order of 1600), and discovered that about half my library is now missing. Ye gods. I hope the nice folks at Delicious Monster can make sense of the backup I made before all this happened. It was a very happy app until it died.

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  1. I’ve been using WordPress for about a week now at Flametoad.com. If you’ve been playing with it at work then I guess you know how ugly the default installation is. I’ve been slowly feeling my way through tweeks. I’ve also been looking at the RSS feeds. I prefer WordPress, but I already have a livejournal. I want to make sure I don’t lose anything if I make the switch.

  2. Ugly—yes, fantastically so. Easy to tweak, though. I got the threaded comments and comment subscription working over there, so if I do switch here it’ll help out the people who like LJ style better. I think you can even do avatars in comments, but I sort of skimmed over that for work purposes.

    I’ve misplaced the tutorial I saw on templates though, so I’m flailing around in that department.