Thanks for the emails and comments on the latest iteration of the DogSite. Many of you have asked to be able to add a quick comment rather than crank out an email; others have been asking for RSS feeds. Some just want to be able to target an individual post and forward it to someone in hopes of causing a stroke. This WordPress template lets me grant all those wishes.

There are a few things I still don’t like about handing the site over to a template. The biggest is not having a backup copy of whatever I post stashed here on the old hard drive. My buddy Hal at Hardscrabble Times writes all his posts in AppleWorks before sending them into the ether, and maybe I’ll follow his lead using TextEdit, which is a nice, clean little word processor. In the one cut-and-paste I did from The Daily Dog v1.0, I noticed that the post retained the formatting of the original instead of assuming the qualities of this new, bigger-and-better digital world. Lots to learn, lots to learn. And me so long in the tooth, too.

HERE WE GO AGAIN — one more crack at using prefab, off-the-rack blogging software to do all the heavy lifting at Mad Dog Media’s digital domain.

I recently learned that Hostcentric allows clients to install WordPress software for free, and once I figured out how to do that without croaking the years of wisdom I’ve uploaded to their servers, I pulled the trigger, picked a template and started dicking around.

There are positive and negative aspects. On the up side, playing with a new toy got me thinking about redesigning the flag, and I think I came up with a good one. You can weigh in on that design in comments, which the old paint-by-numbers site lacks, and subscribe via RSS feed, another upgrade from the previous edition.

The downside is, I’m an old dog trying to learn new tricks. And surprisingly, WordPress doesn’t have a ton of interesting, versatile templates from which to choose. But I kinda like this one, and I’ll be curious to see what you folks think of it. Holler in comments at your convenience.

If I decide to go the WordPress route, whose main advantage is simplicity and mobility, I’ll keep the old site archived somewhere. Seven years worth of foam-flecked jabbering must be preserved, if only for the prosecutors.