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. 🙁

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.”

The iframe sits inside a div tag. I’m going to experiment with making the div hidden when the menus open if the browser is Opera. Sounds hokey, but maybe it will work.

I changed the logo .gif so that it pauses in between headstands and that seems to help with the blinking cursor. It doesn’t seem to pause correctly in Netscape, but then Netscape doesn’t seem to have the cursor problem either. So I guess I’ll have a go at changing all of the weather icons to stand still for a bit.

I also changed the graphics and display effect on the menus. I like the new graphics, but the display is a bit jerky. I think I’ll change that back.