Leigh's Stuff

If you actually visited my old site previously, you might have noticed things have changed. Last year I started an effort to consolidate my myriad of websites into one WordPress blog. Well, I never actually finished, but I’ve reached the point where I’m almost willing to throw out what I haven’t already moved.

My reasoning is that I have entirely too much random stuff in my life to keep me busy these days. Thus, I have no time to maintain all this crap (and let’s not beat around the bush — it *is* crap that has no meaning to anyone but me and perhaps a few friends). So, I’m going to make this live. I’ve got everything I care about either imported or linked to for the time being.

I think I’m going to kill off MessyDesks. That was a funny idea back when I created it, but it hasn’t been touched in over six years, and I don’t think it will be in the foreseeable future. I also intend to eventually move my gallery over to either Flickr or Picasa at some point. I’ve moved this blog over to WordPress.com so I don’t have to worry about maintaining the software. You might wonder why bother with wordpress at all? Well, as you saw on my previous websites, I am not a web designer by any stretch of the imagination. While I’ve done some stuff in Dreamweaver and had it look presentable, I’d much rather worry about the content. A CMS, such as WordPress, lets me forget about the site management aspect and worry about throwing my guts out there for you to laugh at (or with!).

So here it is. This is me. I intend to make a few more posts to bring folks up to date with my life. If you’re really that fascinated with me, stay tuned!

Welcome to the new and uh… well… I’m not going to lie. It’s not particularly improved, at least not at the moment. I decided that henceforth I would integrate my myriad of websites into one large WordPress site. Mainly because I want to try and get a consistent look and feel between sites, but also I’d like to have more crosslinking between the pages. So you come here via messydesks or my gallery, and you see other stuff I’m interested in. Call it a way to strike up conversation

Well… maybe not conversation as of yet. I don’t have comments turned on, but will eventually. First, I want to get most of the content from the previous sites into WordPress. This is proving to be a challenge. Each website was built in a different editor (Netscape, Dreamweaver, Vim), at different times, so they’re all formatted differently. Then WordPress attempts to format the pages as it sees fit, which makes things a bit of a mess. I think I’ve got the hardest of the pages in, though. I also want to consolidate a little bit. For instance, I want to take my Grand Prix pictures and toss them into Gallery, as it’s silly to reinvent the wheel and have a standalone Pictures page for that now.

Messydesks is going to be a whole other beast. Most of that code should be copy and paste as it was written in a text editor. However, the whole website is php driven, and really, was one of my first forays into using php+mysql. However, I don’t think it’ll be particularly difficult to get that into the WordPress site, as it’s mostly text with just one image per page.

So stay tuned. Once I’ve gotten things to a point where I want the world to see it, I’ll replace my current site at http://www.thegovernment.net with this one.