Fall finally rears its old gray head

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 2 Comments

Well, dammit, it can’t be Indian summer forever, I guess. Never got much above the upper 30s today, with a light rain tamping down the dust under a sky as gray as a Repuglican’s face on Election Day 2008.

I hung around indoors, taking care of a few electronic chores, then finally said to hell with it around 3 p.m. and went out for a short run into a cold wind out of the north. This reminded me that Herself had pulled our old-school storm doors out of their basement hideaway and I had not yet put them up, nor had I removed our rattly $99 Sears air conditioner from the north-facing bedroom window and replaced it with the storm window.

The storm doors are a breeze — five minutes with a flathead screwdriver is all it takes to replace screens with glass. The air conditioner was another thing altogether. I couldn’t remember how I installed the damn’ thing (badly), so uninstalling it was an exercise in feline entertainment as the sun began to set. As the cats watched with great interest (“What the hell is he doing now?“) I managed to drop the air conditioner straight out of the window and onto the back deck, bam, cutting the shit out of my right wrist as I tried, unsuccessfully, to save the worthless piece of crap from the death it so richly deserved for waking me up night after night during summertime with its burbling, farting and keening.

I will never be smart. But at least I’ll be warm.

Editor’s note: Don’t forget the old site. It’s still numero uno around here until I decide whether this is the Wave of the Future or merely a ripple on the stagnant pond of my mind. You wrote today’s post, about how to deal with the wolf at the door during the Great Recession.

Old dog, new tricks

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

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.

Test-driving WordPress on maddogmedia.com

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
A neighbor's tree is solid gold.

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.