I’ve dropped in some plug-ins that should make at least some of you happy, because one of the plug-ins should allow you to edit your comments under two conditions: First, that you make the edit within 30 minutes of posting, and second that you’re still using the same IP number as you had when you made the first post. This should probably work just fine for the majority of you; now you can fix that grammatical error without posting a second time to complain about how you made a grammatical error and can’t fix it, waaaah.

Other plug-ins: One that moderates posts after a certain amount of time, so old posts aren’t slammed with whatever spam gets through Akismet, and wp-cache, which creates static pages, to help the database keep from getting slammed during those high traffic moments. I also put a widget up to tell you how many other people are currently loitering on the site. Because I know you’re curious that way.

Anyway, enjoy your new comment editing powers. Try to use them only for the power of good.

Also: The observant among you will note that I’ve reposted the feeds for Whateverettes, By the Way and the Ficlets blog. So once again you can overdose in the glory of my Web hunting and pecking.

As we all know, by both state and federal law any new blog or blog returning from hiatus or other down time must, within 72 hours of resumption, post a picture of a cat, or suffer severe penalties. So here you are. And as a bonus, there’s a dog in it too — not required by federal and state law, but always a good thing.

Go hog wild, people.

It seems the reason I’m getting the database error you’re all seeing is that the theme I’ve been playing with is not compatible with the most recent version of wordpress. So I’ll be switching it out. Don’t be surprised over the next couple of days if the look changes more than once. Again: Patience, please.

Update: I’ve switched over to a nice, modular, compliant and Mac-tastic theme, the Mac-liciousness of which I’ve totally violated by switching the font to Cambria, one of the new Windows Vista fonts (you might not be seeing this). In any event, I think I’ll stick with this as the basic template and modify from here.

My right shoulder is, like, incredibly sore from hauling around huge bags of free books.

Pity me, won’t you? Thank you.

Fortunately I brought my minivan with me so I was able to get them all home. But I suspect the minivan got five miles to a gallon on the way back. These are the sacrifices we make for books.

Some additional notes of a housekeeping sort:

1. I was going to tell you all the long and complicated story of how and why I finally ditched MT4 and moved Whatever over to WordPress, but then I realized I was bored with the whole damn thing and I can’t imagine you’re any less bored with it than I. So I won’t. Be grateful.

2. I’ve restored most of the Whatever files to their rightful place in the directories, so there shouldn’t be too many 404′s now. There may still be a few (particularly for September 2007 bits), and I’ll be going through trying to fill those gaps when I find out about them. Patience, please.

3. Likewise, patience while I learn a little about the themes and templates and capabilities of WordPress. You can see I’m doing a little tweaking already, but I still have to figure out the sidebars and whatnot. It’s not brain surgery, but it is different than what I’m used to. On the other hand I think the site looks nice at the moment.

4. My major concern with WP is the issue with dynamically generated pages as opposed to static pages, and we’ll see how much of a strain we put on the server; my host provider has already assured me it’ll let me know when I’m about to blow up the place. I’ll be installing the thingie that creates static pages in WP, probably later today, but for now we’ll see how the site responds.

5. As part of the stress test, go ahead and leave a comment, why don’t you? Thanks.

I hope to be getting back to something approaching normal here soon. Thanks all of you for bearing with me while all this crap went down. Hopefully, the worst of the technological horrors are behind us now.