Pages on this site that pass the standard bear the w3c logo at the bottom.

I will see about getting the blog up to snuff, but since I’m using WordPress, it involves a bit more digging around.

Yes, it still looks hideous. But the way it looks hideous is so much more elegant, and that’s what matters. Style is everything.

Someday I’d like to translate that hideousness over to this blog, but writing css for WordPress is a bit daunting. Until then, let your eyes be grateful for my laziness.

Anyway, please let me know if things are out of whack (you may need to do a [ctrl]+F5 to clear your cache) and I will whack ‘em back in, post-haste.

And still another apology for this blog itself.  I am so very, very sorry.

This is the default template. I may keep it, I think it looks nice. And by nice I mean average and non-threatening. At some point I’ll have to link back to the main site, vegetablesOfTheMind.com. That would, of course, assume that there is anything of value on that site, which there is not. Unless you count my Bush presidential calculator and my base converter (which oddly enough I use fairly often).
Well, enough of my yakkin’. Let’s boogie!

While this is handy, things may look awry at the beginning of the month. If there’s nothing for the month yet, a cryptic message says “Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.” Since the casual observer has not entered any criteria, things look broke. Or as we software engineers say, “It done blowed up.”

As is often the case in software, things ain’t broke; they’re simply behaving as expected. Maybe someday I will change the message. Until then I will write some fluff toward the beginning of each month to fill some space. Just like this entry.

Today I added some extra protection to the trackback feature of my weblog and so far it seems to have stemmed the flow.

If I ever find Mr. Texas Holdem or Mr. Online Poker he is in for some serious ass-kicking. And a big stinky beer fart.

There’s a part of me that feels that all this is for the good: I need to maintain a secure site and the spammers are simply exposing vulnerabilities. Another part is angry at the principle of the whole thing: I maintain this weblog and as a public service offer the ability for anyone to submit a comment. I don’t want to censor anyone’s comments as I know I can’t grow unless prodded by another viewpoint. The spammers are ruining this functionality for everyone: if I can’t figure out how to stop them, I will have to remove comments altogether and that would be a very sad day indeed. I don’t like having to moderate comments since that discourages an open discussion. Another part of me is annoyed at my blogging software for allowing such easy spammage. While I can’t criticize too much since it’s open source software and I didn’t pay anything for it, at the same time I’m not making money off of it and I’m paying money to have this site hosted.

The new and improved version has been integrated with my weblog. Now all I have to do is log in, create a new blog entry, and assign it to the Soapbox category and it will be pulled up by the menu at the left. No need to ftp or create & modify files. See, technology does save us time and trouble after all!