I didn’t make much progress on Twilight yesterday. For some reason, I’m hesitating about slicing 1500 words–is it because I like the words or they are needed for the story? They convey something to the story, but there’s probably another way to do that, but how would I do it more effectively? I finally decided to mull that over and move on.

In the interim, I played with a couple blogwares. boastMachine looked very promising. Most of my initial troubles with it were determining how to use the MySQL on my server (really very simple) and refreshing my memory on how to set file permissions (also very simple). I got it installed and couldn’t find how to change several things, and the documentation was only so-so. On Saturday morning, I couldn’t get access to it (it had worked fine the night before), and I decided I didn’t want to fight with it anymore, so I deleted it (VERY simple–two clicks, and it was gone). My next effort went to WordPress 1.5. This really took less than five minutes to have downloaded, unzipped, installed, and working. A couple more hours of fun (really) exploration through the dashboard, and I had it configured the way I liked it. Fortunately, the default theme works for me, because I haven’t figured out how to change that yet. If you’re familiar with b2 (I’m not, and didn’t like what I saw on the website when I looked), WordPress is where the original b2 author has shifted his efforts. If I still like it next week, I’ll take it live (Monica already found it, presumably through a traceback to her link). It also claims to be able to import Blogger, so I may give that a try, too–this requires changing my Blogger profile, and I don’t take this idea lightly. It’s blogroll/links feature is wonderfully configurable (not quite as good as manual placement, but other than that, it’s great).

The other thing I did while procrastinating late yesterday afternoon was download and install Firefox. Another less than five minute proposition, and it kindly offered to bring ALL my IE customization over when I started it up (favorites, passwords, etc). Less than an hour later, I decided to make it my default browser. So far, it works well on everything except Outlook on the Web. It choked when I attempted to log into my work email (but I shouldn’t be doing that on the weekend anyway). There may be a couple other things as well. Also, either Blogger fixed their latency, or it’s more responsive with Firefox.

And I woke up with the headache from hell today, so I don’t know what I’ll be doing besides watching basketball today. It started in the center behind my eyes and now extends to my ears. I think it’s on a plane from above and behind my right eye extending to the center of my left ear. This is a new twist on the usual above and behind the right eye only that I’m accustomed to living with for days at a time–well, 18 years ago, but they’ve recently begun making a reappearance. I hadn’t missed them. This is not a happy reunion.