a million monkeys typing

AMMT Mark II

Posted January 1st, 2006 at 03:04pm

You might have noticed a few fresh changes to a million monkeys typing. It all comes as a result of upgrading to WordPress 2.0. For a while now, I’ve been hesitant to install the latest patches and upgrades to WP 1.5.x (yes, I know, I’ve been a naughty boy), since my theme was so heavily customised — it was an all-in-one file I originally made for WP 1.0, and quite a mess after being hauled reluctantly through several versions. This weekend, I decided to strap on the bungee cord, close my eyes, and jump. The actual database work and installation was seamless and smooth, but I didn’t see much point in pushing an antiquated theme that couldn’t take advantage of all the latest generation of WP goodness. Thus, with great trepidation, I grabbed a pre-existing theme with a superficial resemblance to the layout of AMMT –Blix by Sebastian Schmieg– and started creating my style sheets again from scratch.

Might I reveal here that my CSS2 is a tad rusty? Or at least it was, until yesterday morning when I started diving into the plumbing of the styles. Slowly, it all started coming back to me, even all the “standard” codes that break Internet Explorer (which are, as any CSS guru knows, quite numerous). Not everything here is perfect yet, and you’ll no doubt see quite a few things break intermittently in the next couple of days.

Seeing it’s a new year, and a new start in so many ways, I’m going to clear out some of the clutter here, streamline some of the formatting, create a few new features, and generally get back to blogging regularly. Although we’re still not unpacked from our big move, I think it’s a good idea to get back to regular online life again, and despite the success of my other site DIYPlanner.com, I still consider AMMT to be my homestead of sorts. (DIYPlanner was designed to be more of a community than a place for one individual’s voice.)

As for WP2, I am enjoying it quite a bit, but am still undecided about the WYSIWYG editor for posts. Although it’s mostly well done, I find it a little slow on this G3 PowerBook, and keep tripping across paragraph breaking issues. Besides, I speak HTML like a native language, so using the non-WYSIWYG editor is not an impediment of any kind. That being said, all the other changes –such as the streamlined posting interface, the “inline” images and files, the end of .htaccess hassles, and the easier management of content– are priceless, and worth the upgrade. Plus, the whole thing feels much speedier, which is no doubt a result of the interface changes and the new caching mechanism. It’s normally a good idea to wait for the first bug fix release of software, but thus far I have no regrets in jumping headfirst into this upgrade.

I’ll follow this post up in a few days with some more thoughts about using the new WP2, as well as some of the plugins I’ve decided to set up.