I was planning to wait until I had everything all in place before I redirected all katiedurham.com traffic to this WordPress page, but I finally decided “meh.” (It’s a real word now, see?)  I’ve pretty much abandoned doing anything to the old site, so why bother sending traffic to it?

Therefore: welcome to the shiny brand new katiedurham.com!  It is made with WordPress, which I am quickly falling in love with!  I just ended a sentence with a preposition!  Meh!  It is far from complete; I still haven’t written an “About” section or put anything into “Projects,” but “Gallery” is full of fun stuff!  I uploaded everything to Flickr and let WordPress and this great Joe Tan plugin do the rest.  Thank you to all programmers who give their awesome free plugins to all of us mere mortals.  The FriendFeed plugin over there on the sidebar is a plugin by Evan Sims.  I love plugins!

Also awesome:  Moments ago, my browser freaked out and closed everything, but WordPress has autosave and I lost nothing of this post!  I love this.  I really do.

Anyway, welcome to the new site.  You can still find the old site by clicking the link in the sidebar down there on the right.  I’ll leave it up for old time’s sake and all that, but all new content will be here.  I’m sure I’ll be adding more in the other sections as time goes on.  But for the time being, take ‘er for a spin, and let me know what you think!  You can e-mail me or leave a comment below.  Enjoy!

Well, I’ve poked around a bit and have made myself at home here in WordPress.  I took a nice theme someone made and tweaked it until it was mine and I’m pretty happy with the result.  I’m also pretty happy with the relatively tiny amount of work it took to do this compared to tweaking my from-scratch html site.  Although, I’m sure I should take into consideration that I knew nothing about html when I dove into the old site.  I am much more experienced this time around. 

I should be able to push, pull, and prod this site into exactly what I want.  Plus, I can update it in a browser now, with easy bold and italics and all the good things you take for granted in a nice text editor.  I’m really very excited about all of this.  I will leave the old html site up, though, because I still love it and it’s not really taking up any space that I need right now.  Soon I will have katiedurham.com direct people straight here, but I’m not quite ready for that at the moment.  I still need to figure out how to set up a gallery, what to put in the “About” section, and all that jazz. 

I just set myself up with FriendFeed, so it shows all my Twitter updates, YouTube stuff, and Flickr activity right here under “Katie’s Recent Activity.”  Nifty!  Anyway, I’m going to go put a link to here on the old site to show off my new skillz.  Then I will hunt down whatever insolent scrap of code it is that is making those lines in the sidebar still green after I changed all the colors in the stylesheet.  Grr!

Okay, so if this is actually functioning… That was so much easier that I thought it should be.  I have been beating my head against this WordPress wall for weeks and all the while there was a door right next to me.  I feel like a genius.  And I mean that with the utmost sarcasm.  I mean really, Katie.   “Oh that thing there says it will install WordPress for me.  I better not click that.  Let’s see… ah yes manual installation sounds much better.  I’ll go with that.”  Face. Palm.

But anyway, my own idiocy aside; yay!  I have the ability to make a sweet site now! Whee!  Now excuse me while I explore my new surroundings.  And please forgive the obvious sample theme.  That lady with binoculars looked like a monkey in the thumbnail, so I just went with that one.  Anyway, I’m excited!  Are you excited?  Probably not as much as me!  Now I shall frolick through the code forest – tralala la lala la!