For the third time in as many days I’ve accidentally blown away all of my tweaks to the WP index.php by stupidly uploaded the original index.php via Dreamweaver. At least I’m getting faster at re-tweaking. It only took me about 20 minutes to put it back together. A new record!

I know I need to back everything up. I’m waiting until I get the whole thing pretty much as I like it. Besides, I theoretically have two copies — one on the server and one on my computer. When I tweak stuff directly on the server, I usually am able to remember to dump it down to Dreamweaver. But for some reason when I update index.php in the WordPress panel I just don’t remember to download the result. This time I did the re-tweaking in Dreamweaver and then uploaded, so I know the server version is a clone of my local version.

I’ve CHMOD’d index.php to 644 so I can no longer update it via WordPress. If I’m away from my computer and need to tweak something I can always change it back to 666.

Yeah… 666… the number of the beast. Coincidence there? I think not!

I have The Son Spot up again. There’s nothing on it but a link to Autistic Youth. But I wanted the logo gif up again. That little spot going around the sun was my first venture into animating, and I feel rather sentimental towards it.

Continuing to work on Persistent Illusion. Word Press may be easy to install, but it’s not the easiest thing in the world to configure. Unless, that is, one is very proficient in PHP and CSS. I don’t really fit that bill. But I’m learning a lot of CSS by necessity. It would be nice if there were better documentation. But given that it’s an open-source project, no doubt there’s more of an emphasis on doing cool things than on the poor, confused end-user.

…are a blessing.

For a little while, I wasn’t sure that I would actually be able to take yesterday off, but it all worked out OK.

I went to see Shrek 2 yesterday. Sat in the theater and laughed my head off. I needed that. Then I came home and watched The Return Of The King. I needed that, too.

I”m almost done tweaking mommymonster.com (yeah, right!) I still need to redo the weather gifs. And I need to take down the old Movable Type version of the blog. And I’d like to add the Sun Spot back in. But I’ve tested most of the pages with the HTTP and CSS validators. I can’t get a couple of the games to validate because of the way the validators are parsing some of the inline javascripts. But that’s OK. And there are some cases where Arles does not create a totally valid page in the slideshows. But that’s OK, too. The errors are fairly minor and I’m not looking to be xhtml compliant yet.

I’ve also figured out a way to handle surfers that are browsing with images off. I created a stone-colored link to the site map. In IE it hides unobtrusively next to the counter. Opera hides it behind the weather gif, which I actually like better. Opera wins this one. Meh. Whatever works.

I’m getting there with the templates. It seems like a long, slow process. I’m fairly happy with them, though. And I like the new name so I might stick with it for awhile. Those quotes from Einstein and Philip Dick have always been two of my favorites.

We do live in interesting times.

Persistent Illusion is in the process of moving from MoveableType to WordPress. The posts are all here and the format is set, but the templates still need changing. I’ve also changed the name 4 or 5 times.

I’m fickle. What can I say?

Can’t believe how easy this move was, though. WordPress rocks!

After a bit of experimentation, and thanks to a script from http://www.howtocreate.co.uk that snifs out Opera no matter how it has set itself to be recognized, I managed to come up with a little script that hides the iFrame when the menus are displayed if the browser is Opera, and makes it visible again when the menus are hidden. I even managed to make my own add-in to DHTML Menu Builder so that my script is part of the menu’s generated code.

And it works! And there was much rejoicing!

Now Opera users get to see and use the menus, and I’ve added a nice little “complain to Opera if you don’t like it message.”