Today may just be the beginning of the end of me uploading files every time I want to update this site. Yes, I’ve downloaded and am testing Greymatter. It’s actually pretty easy to set up…. but since I’m such a control freak, it’s hard for me to accept using code that someone else has written. Of course, it’s not as if I could develop this myself with what I know now… and it would take a hell of a long time for me to learn to program, even using PHP and MySQL.
After a test run, I may just have to start using Greymatter. What would be nice about using it is that it can automatically create archives. Yes, I do have quite a bit of tweaking to do to the templates (e.g. it creates more types of archive pages than I do now), and need to learn the (fairly obvious) variable names, but that should take less time than, say, learning to program. It would allow you, the reader, to comment directly on the site (!), which might be a good or a bad thing.
And, actually, this might be a good tool for my mom to use on the site I designed for her (more later).
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Today one horrible thing happened: Amber discovered that her (our) 2 hamsters died today. Or, to put it perhaps more delicately, they passed on to that great big Timber Hideaway in the sky. We had had them just under 2 years, and their passing on was really sad and hard to take for both of us.
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Also: our cat is nuts. Suki’s nicknames include “Biter” (for good reason) and “Kittridge” (no reason). Her new one today, coined by me, is “AgitCat” (capitalization for illustration purposes only). For some reason she’s just always agitated. Right now she’s climbing up inside my dresser from the bottom, drawer by drawer.
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It’s hard to write in this weird pale blue <textarea> (trust me). I may or may not get used to it. Maybe it’s customizable. (For today, I uploaded the entry to my test directory, then simply copied the source to this file. But then I did a ton of editing in HTML, since it’s strangely easier to find my voice in 9-point pixelated Monaco in BBEdit. Using Greymatter rather than hand-coding is like trying to have a conversation on a cellphone when you’re used to an antiquated “land line.” It’s not quite the same.)