Summer’s here!

Almost half of 2010 has gone by!

People are buying houses and renovating the h*ll out of them!

Anyway, the first WordPress 3.0 Release Candidate was announced last Friday (May 28), meaning that the next significant iteration of the WordPress blogging/CMS platform will soon leave beta to become the current stable release. This is pretty important as 3.0 brings custom navigation courtesy of Woothemes, code merge with WordPress MU, custom posts, and other enhancements to make it more of a CMS and a whole lot less as a blog-focused platform. I’m good with that – it’s always been easy to use and improved CMS means that it’ll be easier to move this site from less blather to more relevant focused content (content which I’ll eventually right).

Since summer is renovation season, the summer release of 3.0 seems just as good a milestone as any to kick off the renovation of this site. This will be good; Arthemia has been okay but ColorLabs doesn’t seem to be doing much of anything with respect to updates and there are still some things in the theme code that I still haven’t been able to fix (hello, month archives?). So, it’ll be time to kick Arthemia to the curb.

It’d be nice to have a site header/name and widgets that work like they’re supposed to. And I can clean up the mess left over following the installation hiccup and chop away some of the more esoteric plug-ins which 3.0 will make moot. Faster and more stable are also good things to have.

For most people, that probably came across as “blah blah blah. blah blah, blah blah blah. blah blah! blah blah! Ginger! blah blah! blah blah. blah.”

Long story short:  ivanshaw.com will also soon be under renovation and will return with a refreshed look and better scribbling. Who knows? Maybe I’ll even be able to figure out how to do a glass floor.

Anyway, hope the Year We Make Contact works out great for you too.

Well, it reeks of effort, but at least it’s different from the attacks over my Todd Flanders segue, or the Danes and mainland Chinese that have been pestering me on/off for the last year.

The Wine Cellar list is still functioning though (that’s always good).

Obviously the best way is to create compelling content which will make people want to visit (yeah yeah, I’m having some difficulties with that). However, many sites generate very little original content on their own, relying instead on automated feed aggregators and other robots to collect content and links from other sites.

I’m fine with that: a lot of people can’t or won’t write and there are obviously people who like to just visit one URL to see everything that’s available on specific topics. Besides, automated link inclusion and trackbacks obviously drive traffic to me: I like to think that on occassion, someone who lands here by chance will want to come back of his/her own volition for the snappy hip stuff I post (it could happen).

The problem with automating collection is that if the selected keywords are too general and there’s no subsequent triage of what’s collected, it can very quickly p*ss off the audience the blogsite is trying to cater to. Case in point: what I wrote on hot monkey love.

Those of you who did read it can probably tell that it’s an attempt to get cheap laughs you to learn something new, specifically the importance of chemical signaling via scent and its role in intra- and interspecies recognition. However, there is apparently enough in there that it warranted inclusion by the aggregator from a site catering to those who count um… “auto-stimulation” as a hobby.

Oops. Not my fault (or intention) but I’m pretty sure that fruitflies kinda kill the mood.

The “WTF? cake” photo courtesy SanFranAnnie on Flickr and is used under a Creative Commons license. It certainly lives up as an homage to WTF? as it’s apparently a vegan cake that uses cream in the frosting (free the cows!)

I so love it when software arbitrarily overwrites settings. So, 72 hours and a lot of angst later, I’m back online. Retained: all the previous entries I’ve made to stock up “content”. Lost: the images, the gallery in development, the photoblog, the lightbox image views. Peachy. Well, the gallery isn’t a big deal as the next iteration is to have standalone gallery editing so may as well leave that be until then.