You may noticed that some odd changes here during the past day or so. This is part of a long term plan I’ve had to tidy up and “rethink” the structure of the site.

The plan is to have easily accessible links to posts specific to each category as part of the main site navigation. The categories I’ve selected are:

• Gear: Computers, video, hardware and general gadgetry
• Games: computer and console titles, both reviews and general discussion
• Girls: women that geeks who like women will like… I have work to do here, but expect to see Number 6, Seven of Nine, and others showing up here
• Geek Miscellany: Science, advanced technology, and related topics that don’t fit in any particular category
• Rants: My occasional (usually over the top) opinions on things like politics, the news, and other stuff
• Life: what is happening in my immediate vicinity- family, around the house, and the like
• Critters: News and information about the animals that share our domicile
• Site News: posts like this one that talk about this blog

Each of these choices will lead you to a page that gives a brief description of the category and contains only matching posts. Once I get things working the way I want, the main or “Home” page will only list brief summaries of each post. At the moment, the categories are more or less in place, but some of the site navigation features aren’t working quite right yet. I expect to have the main details ironed out in the next couple of days, so bear with me.

I’ve updated to the latest version of WordPress (2.3.3), the software that makes this blog work, and also updated half a dozen of the plugins on my site. In *theory*, none of the changes should be noticeable to anyone visiting here.

However… I’m doing this rather quickly, and undoubtedly something is broken now. If you notice any problems… well, feel free to complain to the management

I’ve added a new feature to my blog.  If you look on the right side, you’ll notice a “Now Reading” section.  You can also just click this link to go to the main summary page.

I’m using Rob Miller’s “Now Reading” Wordpress plugin.  I even sent him $20 via Paypal- the plugin works and so far at least does everything I wanted- Thank you, Rob!  The data itself is apparently stored in mySQL, and you can add new fields (key-value pairs) to add more data beyond the basics.

I’ve loaded in 20 or so books that I’ve read in the last year.  This isn’t anything close to the full list of books I’ve read in the last 12 months- instead, I just looked over at the nearest bookshelf (where I keep the most recent ones) and read off the titles I could see.  Since the top shelf it two layers deep, that means even that method is missing quite a few titles.  I think I read probably forty books a year, give or take, with an average of 500 pages.  I’m going to try to keep track of what I’m reading reasonably accurately going forward.  We’ll see how that works out

This is a test post to see how Windows Live Writer works.  Windows Live Writer is an “off line” blog posting tool.  Naturally, it is designed to work with Windows Live blogs, but it also supports Wordpress and others.

Right out of the starting gate, it seems to have picked up my site’s basic settings (name, categories, etc) fairly accurately.  I see it supports tagging, but I think I’d have to do some futzing to get it to work with Ultimate Tag Warrior (the plug in I use here). 

UPDATE:  I found this post on the topic of adding UTW tag support to WLW by Pascal Vanhecke.  His guidance appears to have worked perfectly.  Thank you, Pascal!

Here is a picture which I drag and dropped into the posting, and a map which WLW also allows you to search for and add.

The following text is a block quote:

I am intrigued to see that it seems to pick up the block quote formatting from my site…perhaps by reading the site CSS?

It also has a web preview that presents a simulation of my website with the new post added- neat! 

The following tags are not actually UTW tags- this is a built-in technorati tag type from WLW

How about this for timing….on February 27th, I upgraded my version of Wordpress from 2.0.4 to 2.1.1.  It was quite some time since my last upgrade, and there were several security fixes that I needed to get installed.  I was briefly proud of myself for getting my site sort of up to date.

Then yesterday there was this announcement.  To save you from having to click the link, here’s the important excerpt:

Long story short: If you downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days, your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker, and you should upgrade all of your files to 2.1.2 immediately.

So…I picked the three or four days in the entire history of WordPress, which has been one of the most stable and secure blogging platforms around, to upgrade.  How’s that for amazing timing?

Don’t worry, I’ve (just finished) upgrading to the secured version.  And to be clear to my non-techy visitors: none of this has *anything* to do with the security of my visitors.   If you have your own WordPress blog (and obviously aren’t “non-techy”), upgrade now- this is not an optional upgrade!