For far too long I have not been able to post. Not because I’ve been too busy, although that has contributed. No… the latest WordPress upgrade rendered me incapable of actually saving anything I wrote.

If you visited over the last week or so, you may have noticed that sometimes things looked different. Sometimes there were features missing. Sometimes there were whole chunks of PI missing. Sometimes nothing worked at all. There was nobody I could call because… I’m my own webmaster. I will spare you the long, sad tale of sleepless nights spent slaving over the keyboard, frantically searching for an answer; the countless plugins deactivated / upgraded / reactivated only to be trashed; the numerous discussion groups combed for answers; the multiple configurations tried on my local desktop that worked fine, only to be hosed (technical term) when uploaded to where everyone else could see it. Late Friday night I found the answer: Move from PHP4 to PHP5 on my host’s web server. All things magically began to work again. Posts could be saved without the dreaded blank, white screen appearing (think Window’s Blue Screen Of Death, only worse). Ahhhhhhhhh … sleep

In the midst of the panicked frenzy upgrading a few new or modified features were added. Nicer Archives, the plugin that served me faithfully (with a few tweaks) since WP 1.2 days, finally gave up the ghost (RIP). There’s a new expandomatic archives listing in the History tab. Click on the years and months and it drops down. Cool, eh? Translate is once again available (click on the flags at the top of the left sidebar). Thought Of The Day and Current Weather are driven by new, and hopefully more stable, engines. How People Get Here is a new word cloud that shows what searches are leading readers here. To avoid banging my head against the wall in despair I took the opportunity to finally update the PI favicon (that’s the little icon that shows up next to the PI name in the browser address). It now actually fits into this theme rather than a very old, long discarded, quite garishly colored scheme. (I really wanted to use a ball of yarn and knitting needles to form the P and the I in the icon. It looked great at 72×72 pixels, but when reduced to 16×16 pixels it became a featureless blob that didn’t look at all like yarn and needles, much less like a P and an I.)

There are some other changes under the covers that you probably won’t notice.

I love WordPress, and certainly the price is right. But free can also be read as virtually unsupported. And sometimes the features that the authors think are really, really cool cause some issues in the general WordPress-using public who are not expecting such sudden changes. WP 2.2 was not supposed to be a major upgrade. sigh I supposed I should be happy that it forced me into a few probably much-needed updates here and there.

Thank you so much, gentle reader, for continuing to visit and comment in my supposed absence. I was listening and watching. And now I’m back.

The pictures are proof that I did get a little knitting time in.

The Spanish Lavender Basket Wave socks are up past the heels and heading up the legs. They are posing amidst my Climbing Iceberg rose. It’s nearly time for the annual Rose Festival and everything is in bloom. I really wanted to photo the socks with my Eyepaint rose. But, alas, the bright red of the rose did not add anything to the lovely Walking On The Wild Tide colors. White, fortunately, goes with everything.

Anyway, I worked the heel flap in heel stitch with a garter border. You can sort of see it on the right-hand sock in the picture. I think it fit into the basket theme quite well and looks like it’s lined up nicely with the pattern on the leg. The lower picture is a close-up of the basket weave stitch pattern across the instep. I know it seems sort of un-sockclub-ish to some to use a different pattern. But I’m really happy with the way this stitch works with this yarn. I would not be nearly as happy with the Sock Club pattern, although it is a fine pattern and one I plan to knit with a different yarn.

I am still waiting for the perfect yarn, due in at Tangle any day now, to start the socks for my Sockapalooza 4 sock pal. I have no idea what these socks are going to look like. But I know the yarn will tell me what it wants to be.

[ed 11:12 am PDT] P.S. I almost forgot to mention that there are now a couple of wonderful Magic Cast On videos available on the web. I’ve linked to them in the right-hand sidebar. One, from the kind people at Renaissance Yarns has a voice-over in English, and the other, courtesy of Calcetines Tejidos is in Spanish. Enjoy!