I was on such a roll yesterday. I accomplished so many nerdy things that I never thought I'd have the ability to accomplish.

First, I exported all my old livejournal entries and converted them to WordPress posts. This was all handled within WordPress and was all automated. There are some minor issues pertaining to formatting and some other things, but I'm all done! My old pictures (2005-2008) can be seen in the lj category: here. There are pictures from my wedding/honeymoon, new hampshire, all kinds of good stuff. It even imported all the old comments. Pretty happy about that.

It's interesting for me to see that, in many ways, I had no idea how to edit/optimize photos back in 2005-06, but I still managed to post a lot of good shots. I think that's because my original Nikon "coolpix" e5700 was able to do so many things on its own. Excellent macro support, RAW support, and a movable screen with live view made it a perfect "starter" camera. I often wonder what would have happened to my interest in photography if I had gotten a different camera at the time. I definitely miss being able to shoot in macro mode.

After that I spent quite a bit of time trying to understand style.css sheets and how all the different .php files come together to make all my pages/categories on this blog. I have a very simple layout on here, so I think I may have actually learned how it all works. I changed the sidebar on the right, gave it a grey background and got rid of the dividing line between the main section (here) and the sidebar (over to the right). I also took forever to make that custom search bar with no "search" button to click, and made a few pics for my "about me" section. A few steps in the right direction. Now I just need a banner at the top, and a few other things. This is easier than I thought. I've been so scared to edit anything (last time I learned anything about HTML, style sheets were not in use, and now they determine the entire look of your site) that I've avoided it all, maybe a bit too much.

Then, since I was on a roll, I looked up ways to make Ubuntu faster and ended up editing 4 config files (blindly trusting some people's blog posts and forum responses I found via Google). Still up and running in Linux, so I didn't break anything... I don't think. I'm starting to drink the Linux cool aid a little bit. It breaks down to two basic things for me. First, you are immune to everything Windows isn't. Shady website? Might have viruses? No big deal, I'm immune to all viruses in Linux. Second, if you care enough, you can make Linux do anything you want. For instance, when I receive an instant message (AIM service), my computer reads my messages aloud to me. It took a lot of work, but I hooked my AIM client through the "accessibility" text-to-speech synthesizer. In Linux, you have unfettered access to even the most sensitive files, so you can always fix whatever is wrong. If you care enough.

I started off trying to learn how to modify this crap so I can get my wife's blog (in the works) going, and in the process of learning how to do a few things, I took a 6-8hr detour and worked on my own site all day.