Earlier this afternoon, I finally did something I’d been meaning to do for literally years: Configure a dedicated domain for ContraPositive Diary. It’s done, and I’ve pointed contrapositivediary.com to the WordPress instance I created back in September on Fused Network. I’m still learning it, testing it and interviewing widgets and plug-ins, so although the domain and the blog are now live, there’s still not much to see.
That will change on January 1. On that day I will stop editing Contra entries by hand (as I’ve done since 1998) and begin using WordPress. Entries from 1998-2008 will remain pure HTML and be accessible as such. I’m going to copy them from duntemann.com over to contrapositivediary.com, but the copies on duntemann.com will remain there until I kill the Sectorlink hosting account and move the domain over to Fused Network. I intend to keep my LiveJournal account, and use the LJXP crossposter plug-in to automatically cross-post anything I post on WordPress to LJ.
There’s a lot of other stuff on duntemann.com that has to go somewhere. The duntemann.com domain is begging for a new index page anyway, and I’m working on how to organize it. I do know that my Maker material on electronics, telescopes, and kites will all be rewritten using CSS and placed under my junkbox.com index. I intend to install a new instance of the Gallery photo manager there, and move the Tech Projects portion of gallery.duntemann.com over to gallery.junkbox.com. Beyond that, well, I won’t know until next year.
Some conceptual issues remain undecided; e.g., should I continue to group short link citations into larger Odd Lots entries, or just post them as I find them as individual entries? The way I do it now is an artifact of how I create Contra entries generally: I keep a text file in a window and add short items to it until I decide it’s time to format them and post them as a group. That becomes unnecessary with WordPress, and I can streamline the whole process by just popping up Semagic (or something like it) and posting them Right Now instead of storing them locally until I have time to format them for uploading.
WordPress itself is an amazing thing. I’m still trying to figure out what all it can do, either by itself or with the jungle of plug-ins you can find for it. What I know it can do is save me time, which seems to be in shorter supply every year, and that, ultimately, is what the whole exercise is about.
