Whoa, WordPress 2.7 is shiny!  And fortunately for me, the same magic button I originally clicked on my web host’s site to install WordPress had transmogrified into an “Upgrade Now” button.  Gasp!  SiteGround, how did you know?  You spoil me, you really do.  Now I wish I hadn’t dragged my feet about upgrading.  It took literally 5 seconds.  And this is nice.  I feel the same urge to run my hands over the dashboard as I feel in someone’s brand new car.  Beautiful! 

Plus the upgrade didn’t seem to ruin anything.  All my settings, files, photos, etc. are all in perfect order.  This certainly made my night!  Now I can focus on my secret projects…

Hello! I am still here and still doing stuff, as can be seen from my Twitter feed.  Unfortunately, I seem to have fallen into the inevitable Twitter-Blog trap.  I already Twittered it, so why bother blogging, right?  Has that ever happened to you?  Well, it happened to me.  Except that I was never very regular in the first place.

Irregardless (a horrible mangling of ‘regardless’ which Merriam-Webster gave up on and made into a real word, blegh), a lot has happened in Katieland since November 23, 2008, the date of my last post.  Let’s review, shall we?

• I’ve relented somewhat on the word “blog.”  Don’t get me wrong – I still hate that word.  Hate it.  But I also hate the term “hang out.”  However, I am forced to use these words because there is no viable replacement for either.  At least not without sounding like a pretentious snob.  So, I will no longer tiptoe around calling this website a “blog” because in our English vernacular, that’s exactly what it is.  I know, this is terribly interesting. But hey, you’re the one still reading, right? Heh heh.
• Snow! We’ve had awesome snow for the last week or so.  I shall post some photos and perhaps videos soon.
• Speaking of videos, if you follow my Twitter, you know that I recently got a Flip Ultra from the wonderful woot.com.  I lof eet.  So video updates might be a regular thing around here.  I’m thinking I’ll go with Vimeo instead of YouTube, though.  Just because YouTube can be such a harsh environment and Vimeo seems more private and better suited to just messing around and showing bits of personal life.  Although I haven’t gotten any mean comments on my one YouTube video yet, I believe that is only because it’s clips of The Guild, not me or my friends and family.  I don’t think I can handle the mean YouTube commenters.  Plus I think on Vimeo you can choose your own video thumbnail instead of the one of three random screenshots on YouTube.  That’s cool.
• Marc is home!  My brother Marc has been in Taipei, Taiwan for 10 months and he finally came home Wednesday night.  On Christmas Eve, but that is only a coincidence since we don’t celebrate Christmas (more on that will be forthcoming in the soon-to-be About Me section).  My family is whole again and my mom couldn’t be happier.  Especially since he’s living at their house for the time being [winkyface].
• I’m going to walk away from the computer right now to check my mail.  If my Dr. Horrible DVD isn’t here yet, I will be back to cry about it… AGH! Still not here! What is the deal, United States Postal Service?!  Everyone else seems to have gotten theirs last week – where is mine?!  I paid for it with my own money and everything!  It’s not like I’m in another country or something!  Gah!  Okay, enough of that, but grrr.

So that’s your friendly Katie update.  I’ll be back soon to add videos and photos and such, but first I’m going to try to remember how I installed WordPress so I can upgrade to Version 2.7.  That should be fun.

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!