Before we could like things, we had to decide whether something was 3 stars or 4 stars and I could never decide whether 3 stars meant this is pretty good or I am quite disappointed in this but not enough to give it two stars. 4 stars for me means it’s fairly bloody amazing but not quite up there with the all time greats but for someone else it might be it’s not their best work and, frankly, I am a bit disappointed. What if you change your grading scheme three years into using, say, Netflix? Would you have to go and recalibrate all your scores? And what does it mean when something is three and a half stars?

No. Like is so much simpler. You either liked it or you didn’t. If you want to say some thing more, you can share it or blog about it.

Like is liberating too. You don’t have to give it too much thought. If it made you smile, click the like button. It’ll make the person at the other end smile too to see that little red number 1 that says “Pew, Barney McGrew and four others liked your post”.

For some reason, +1 doesn’t quite have the emotional effect that like has. I click +1 all the time on stuff like posts in Google Reader but I am never quite sure where all those 1s go. Does Google have a big bucket of 1s somewhere that I’ll get to enjoy later?

I click like all the time now, even on my stuff, and I get to smile twice. Last night, I reviewed a ton of old posts to see if there were any problems in my new layout and, of course, ended up reading them all. Every time I read one that made me smile, I clicked like. I didn’t even care that no one else would see it. Try it yourself. Start with the highlights down there in the fat footer.

I started from the most basic theme template I could find – Starkers – and converted it to use all new html5 tags.  Starkers has no CSS, so I was starting from scratch.

Here, for posterity, are my three themes side by side.

Best part of the whole exercise? I have confirmed once and for all that PHP is absolutely the nastiest programming language I have ever come across. I don’t get why it is so popular at all. Debugging wordpress is like doing a surreal jigsaw puzzle where you are looking for a brightly coloured machine tool to match the giraffe. If there is an organizing principle, I couldn’t find it. It seems completely random whether it grabs markup from a template or spits it out from a function or a widget or a plugin. It’s amazing that WordPress is so good.

I’m not quite done yet. I have a few weird tags left to style. I want to do something with responsive design and I want to do something special for ipad and iphone. When I am done with all that, I might make it work on IE ( < 9.0 ). Google Analytics says I get hardly any visitors with IE (72% of visitor time on my blog comes from macs and ipads!) but my mum has IE so I either need to make it work or fly to England to install Firefox for her. That’s probably the cheapest option to be honest.

PS. If those side-by-side images are still aligned vertically when you read this, it’s because I haven’t figured out how to style the image gallery yet. I didn’t even know wordpress had a gallery plugin until just now.

PPS. If anyone needs a site built in wordpress – find someone else.

I keep coming back to the official WordPress client and it keeps surprising me with how lame it is. I’m now on the hunt for a better one. My needs are modest.

I don’t need wysiwyg but don’t make me mess with HTML tags on an iPad keyboard for heaven’s sake. Markdown or something similar would be excellent.

I don’t need access to every feature of HTML and CSS. I want paragraphs, images, links, block quotes, italics and ..er… That’s it. Sometimes I float my images left and right. It’d be nice to move images around easily without doing battle with the iOS cut’n'paste monster. Images would come from iPad’s photo app or copy paste from the web.

Give me tags, save a draft and preview. I can do all the admin stuff through the web site.

I’d pay money for that app.

If I were dreaming a little, I’d want to paste images in from web sites and upload them to wordpress automatically. I’d want it to be supremely easy to paste links to the sites I reference, maybe even surf from within the app and snag images and links with a quick tap.

Split screen preview would be nice. I’ll type markdown in one panel and see a preview in the other, ideally using my theme.

Is there such an app? Do I really have to write it myself?

I am a newbie here! I would like to exhort firsthand friends, debased to down ideas and learn more knowledge. Scheme you deal with up identical’s turn without intruding permitted me here!

Hey presto! No more email spam!

But, seemingly by coincidence, just as the email spam stopped, I started getting heaps and heaps of disgusting comment spam on my blog. It’s tiresome, having to wade the pages of filth and, even though it feels like I am very good at spotting and deleting the spam at a glance, I always worry that I might delete a genuine comment.

I don’t often get comments from strangers, but it’s always just a little heartwarming when I do and I’d hate to delete them by mistake.

UPDATE
I figured it out. Duh!
All my blog plugins mysteriously disappeared a couple of weeks ago. I added them all back except the spam filter.

Problem solved. It helps to talk about these things.

I absolutely love my iPad but there a couple of things it completely sucks for. It especially sucks for editing.

When I blog, I like to write very quickly and then go back and edit. I move stuff around, I chop bits out and reword stuff – all things that are horrifically painful on an iPad. The worst part of it is that the web-based editor doesn’t work right. The wysiwig editor doesn’t work at all, but the HTML view keeps jumping back and forth every time you select something.

It also sucks for embedding images in text. As far as I can tell, it’s not possible.

Halfway through yesterday’s entry on the TSA, I switched to my Mac. Today, I’ll just type and type (typing is easy enough, even on the screen keyboard) but I just won’t edit. Wont even proofread it. I’ll just post it mistakes and all.

WordPress have just announced a new version of an iPad app for writing blogs. The previous one was a joke. I’ll let you know how the next one is if I ever get it to work.

By far, most visitors to my blog are searching for either Clown Sex or LOLMouse pictures and my favourite posts never get a look in so, last night, I rummaged through and tagged some of my favourite posts; usually posts that gave me a lot pleasure when I wrote them or that have special significance in my life.

When I get around to it, I’ll update the little widget thingie to cycle through my favourite posts so that new visitors, if they care to know what I am about, can skip over the dross.

It’s not finished yet and hardly works at all on Internet Explorer and who knows what it will do on an iphone but better out than in, I always say.