Beth says it’s a cliche at best.

Cherry blossoms in the afternoon.

Melody Ralls was sharp enough to use a widget-centric layout in this theme. Nevertheless, when I hauled down the new WordPress Widget plug-in last night, I discovered tyhat it wasn’t that easy to simply re-widgetize everything. OTOH, reading the readme.txt of these plug-ins is an education in itself!

What I don’t get is this: I decide I’m going to move and here a year later I’m just starting to get in gear. Jeneane decides she’s going to move like yesterday, and already she has a site layout that’s dope and makes mine look like some kind of 1999 HTML brochureware thingie.

All sour grapes aside, she has a really funny captioned slide show from SXSW that makes it worth the price of admission.  Welcome to WordPress J!  It’s about time!

Today is the peak bloom date for the cherry blossoms in DC.  Tomorrow will be high color too, I’m sure.  And that is a wonderful thing, because I’ll be there.  If it isn’t raining cats and dogs, I hope to get a few snapshots.

The post creation panels at TypePad are so friendly, so obvious. I’m really going to miss them. I haven’t figured out how to easily flip back and forth between HTML and WYSIWYG here on WordPress. I wonder if a third party tool like Qumana will iron out any of these wrinkles?

Update:  there is a whole page of WordPress documentation given to “client” alternatives.  I might as well start with Qumana!  There are some great bloggers who swear by it.  At least I think Jeneane swears by it… she probably still swears by it but how can you tell, faced with the blogspot white screen of blahhh.

Gary Turner sent me a blog warming gift… ballistics. Dean Landsman suggested supercalifragilistics. Sometimes I’m thinking pugilistics, and of course there’s always journalistics. Thank-you both, Gary and Dean. I have a feeling that a lot of listics will emerge. I hope anybody passing by feels free to contribute.

Peter (the other) says,

The good thing about reaching a certain age, I have lost most of my embarrassment machinery.

Thanks to Niek Hockx for providing a little bling. Very Web toot-dah-toe, doncha know?

Stowe Boyd, who has been placeholding my “links” section in the right sidebar began an experiment in mindful traffic growth almost three months ago. Stowe started his /Messages blog with a Technorati rank of 1,088,376 (zero links from zero sources). Since I’ve been dithering and testing here for about a year, I actually have 4 links from 2 sites (one of them mine) and a Technorati rank of 864,574. That’s a head start. Between now and June 30, I will do what I can to migrate from TypePad to WordPress, from Sandhill Trek rel. 2.0 to Sandhill Trek rel. 3.0 - now at Listics.com

Just as a benchmark the ‘rati data on Sandhill rel. 2.0 are:

Technorati Rank: 9,200 (580 links from 161 sites), or 10,807 (448 links from 142 sites) depending on how you form the URL. The old Radio blog that saw its last post in December of 2024 ranks 313,538 (14 links from 9 sites).

So let’s call today day one, even though there will be much hammering and sawing, shouted obscenities, and all the other dust and background noise associated with building the sets. And let’s see where we are by mid-summer. I’m sure there will be some cross posting the first month or so, but ultimately, the goal is to provide a higher quality blog from a more intentional blogger and cut out some of the middle-men whose performance problems turn into my own.

The Technorati thing has matured. Here’s the tagalicious tagging tagiography:

here we go again