Welcome one, welcome all to v3.0 of DmentD.com!
The last major overhaul of this site was about five and a half years ago (January 2003), and it opened to thunderous fanfare — the crickets were a nice touch. It was a growth step that took me away from obnoxious, poorly cobbled together page design to a more conservative, blog-based concept. With the (at the time) expert and ground breaking programming assistance of Mensa, we managed a scratch built posting/display system that was flexible enough for a programmer to expand upon in any direction he chose.
Five and a half years later, the programmer has shed his diapers and is flying at light speed in directions nobody could have expected. He has, more than once over the last few years, looked at the code for DmentD.com and said “who wrote this pile of crap?”, only to remember it was him. I have done my best to reverse engineer his work and add features of my own, and when spam started becoming an issue, Mensa did his best to graft sophisticated engineering onto a cinder block. Dr. Frankenstein would shake his head in embarrassment.
With a pile of behind-the-scenes features left to do, and a programmer with ever increasing demands on his time that didn’t include having to bang his head repeatedly on his desk in frustration trying to do me the favor of making the ‘old girl’ watertight again, I was quietly disheartened. I decided to just let things be for a while.
I recently, however, set up a new domain and site for Sweets. I used WordPress, and Gallery2 (which I was successfully using on my site… the only large-chunk brand-spanking new code I’ve had in ages, and from an outside repository no less), and was shocked at how quick it was to install, how very simple it is to configure, and how modular it is. There are plugins aplenty, the styling is easy to tweak, and best of all, it requires very little programming skill to make some surprisingly major changes. I know, I’m late to the WordPress party. Shut up.
Hmm.
So, I quietly worked on this revamp. Utilizing the mad-genius skills of GonzO (and numerous bribes of alcohol), all my old blog and other data has been migrated over, and I just need to go back through all the posts and fix broken links and pictures. My old familiar friends are still in place — the random quote, the gallery image, the blogs — along with a few new faces. I’ve signed up for, and added a Twitter feed to the navigation bar so I can keep everyone up to date with the progress of my bowels in 140 characters or less. There are the native WordPress options to jump to a category, view posts by month, search the entire site, and subscribe to RSS feeds for everything. The gallery is now integrated into the blog itself, making image posting a downright treat to do. Behind the scenes is a really dynamic spam filtration system, and an administration control panel that is slicker than whale shit.
For those of you who like to comment on my shenanigans, your first comment will require moderation, and as long as you don’t wipe your cookies out in your browser, you should be able to comment without impediment.
There is still a lot of mopping up to do from the data migration, and I’m sure I’ll be tweaking and fiddling a considerable amount in the weeks to come, but basically this is the dealio. Just be sure to take your shoes off when you come in, the carpet is new.