I haven’t talked about the transition to WordPress in a while because the transition is pretty much complete. I had hoped to have this Celestial Waste of Bandwidth complete by the time my new iPhone book came out, but I can’t say that I’ve reached the “Golden Master” stage yet.

The stages of project development are as follows:

1. Recognize how much better your world would be if [state your desired result].
2. Define your desires in terms of an articulated goal.
3. Break down a series of steps that you can complete, in sequence, to realize said goal.
4. Explore the tools that you’ll need to complete each step.
5. Successful proof-of-concept, confirming that all of your preceding choices are sound ones.
6. Developmental deployment.
7. Project achieves functional stability.
8. Private beta deployment.
9. Project is feature-complete, but still awaiting fine-tuning and incorporation of as-yet-unknown bugfixes and new features.
10. Assemble input from beta group; evaluate data collected thus final re-evaluation of what defines “success” in this deployment and what’s required to get there.
11. Widening from a private beta deployment to a public beta deployment.
12. Official public release.

I am currently at Step 8. The Celestial Waste of Bandwidth isn’t finished yet, but I’m tempted to get out a Sharpie, jot a simple phrase on a Post-It note, and slap it down over Stages 9-12.

That phrase is “**** it; let’s just go with what we’ve got and add things as we go.”

If the Linux community had a company store, you could buy pads with that phrase pre-printed for your convenience.

Here are the major Action Items that are still open:

I still need to wire up a navigation bar under the header.

Ranking: Critical.

I’ve been playing with Tigra Menus and I think that’s going to be my solution. I was hoping I could find plug-in that would reduce this thing to an utter no-brainer. I mean, to my delight, I’ve found that this is usually the case. I’m about to crack my knuckles and rock out some JavaScript or PHP, but nope…all I actually need to do is download some scripts and copy them into a directory.

That is, there are indeed some WordPress horizontal navigation thingies. But none of them seem to be as simple to use or as flexible as just pasting Tigra’s mostly-JavaScript mojo into the theme templates.

I need to commit to a structure for the whole site.

Ranking: Critical. 

I do want the Celestial Waste of Bandwidth to have various sections, and based on things that are happening right now and things that’ll be happening soon, I know what some of those sections are going to be. But if I make sloppy choices early on, a year from now I’ll have a navigation menu that contains about 40 sub-items. And the menu next to it will contain just “About This Site…” and “This site: About it.”

Alas, this is a critical part of product development. It costs nothing to sit down and figure out the answer to the question “What is this thing supposed to do?” but there’s nothing more expensive than a wrong answer.

I need to retool CWOB.COM as a “magazine cover” for IHNATKO.COM.

Ranking: Important.

I’ve been mulling over the problem of choosing an “official” domain for the new site. When I first set it up, I used “ihnatko.com” because I wasn’t actually using it for anything else. I bought the domain years ago chiefly just to take if off the playing field. I get so much email addressed to “Andy Inkato” and “Andy Inhatko” and “Andy Ikanato” that I never had the slightest inclination to use it as an official domain or email address.

Now that the site has been up for a few months, I must say that I rather like seeing my name in the URL. You can’t buy publicity like that, you know?

But from a practical standpoint, CWOB is a much better name. If you hear CWOB.COM in a podcast or somewhere, you’re 97% sure to type it in correctly; that goes up to 99.99% (I have research; excutive privilege prevents me from releasing it to the public) if you hear the name of the site, too.

Plus, I’ve been going back and forth about what people should see first. A big “Welcome to the frabjous land of Andrew Fillmore James Ihnatko” page with some sample content and a link to the blog? Or just dive people right into the corn crib of delights known as the Celestial Waste of Bandwidth?

So, two birds with one stone: CWOB.com will be the “front page” of IHNATKO.COM. Which makes sense. The folks who are the most likely to type CWOB into their browsers are people who have just heard me mention the site in a podcast, so they’d be the most interested in learning just what the hell any of this is actually about.

Come up with a custom site theme.

Ranking: Need to get to it eventually.

Meanwhile, I’ve made practically no progress in building a wizzo custom site theme. I’ve started learning the basics but haven’t written a scrap of code.

Clearly it’s gonna have to happen sometime but it doesn’t look like I’m going to have enough free time to really work on this. So I’ll stick with what I’ve got an keep modding its built-in stylesheets as desired.

I do wish I hadn’t been so hasty about choosing a layout format. The final version needs to be wider, methinks. I still don’t know if I wanna go with two columns or three.

My resistance to using a whole lotta columns is that I’m regularly shocked (seriously: afterwards, I can’t feed or bathe myself) by the sight of incredibly popular blogs that are buried in multi-column clutter. And these sites are making lots of dough! They can afford to pay someone to make it look nice, right?

It’s taken a while to figure out how I’d use a third column. Left gutter would be stuff related to me (my upcoming appearances, my books, my Twitter and Flickr feeds, etc.) Right gutter is for stuff related to the blog (calendar, search, popular tags, RSS links).

But to make that happen, I’d have to make a bunch of changes. It seems like the sort of thing that will either take twenty minutes (five minutes to select a new layout from the theme menu, fifteen minutes to make whatever little tweaks are necessary to make it look nice) or twenty days. And I won’t have time for anything ambitious until the end of next month, y’know?

If I were thinking “wide layout” earlier on, I also would have designed a wider masthead. So back to Photoshop for a few hours to figure out what to do with the extra space.

(A masthead redesign would give me a chance to fix something that’s been bugging me for weeks: the top of my head should poke up above the rest of the masthead, shouldn’t it?)

Anyway. So there’s where we are right now. I’m still 100% convinced that WordPress was the right choice. It’s a great system to work with and (here’s the dealbreaker) it’s clear that if my needs ever outgrow WordPress, then clearly it’d be a time for me to hire professionals to design and build a site for me.

and until the end of January at

It’s not much of a title but it’s the best I can come up with after the past two or three hours. I wound up doing some productive goofing off tonight, though I use the term “productive” advisedly. If the purpose was to put off doing actual, paying work, then put me in a flightsuit and hang a “Mission Accomplished” banner in the background as I stroll out to meet the cameras. If I was truly hoping that any of the WordPress-ey things I researched and installed would actually work, though…not so much, no.

I’m doing lot of research and that always involves a certain amount of outright stealing. “Hey, a ‘Most Popular Posts’ thingamabob in the sidebar!” I think, after drifting across a support page for something or other. “Cool, I’ll have that.”

So I look for a WordPress plugin and wind up installing the OWA Most Popular widget, which seems to be just the thing. Failure. Oh, right…I bet you need to install Open Weblog Analytics to make it work. Download and install OWA…and now the whole site’s spitting out fireball-like errors.

“Drat and blast,” said I, and I meant it. Were I a properly-licenced Londoner I would have added “With knobs on” for maximum effect.

Once again, I’ve been skeezixed by tool that claims to be zero-configuration, but isn’t. Some other night I might have time to figure out precisely what’s going wrong, but it seems as though I can score a cheap but very real victory by simply deactivating those new plugins but a win’s a win. I depart from the Admin page garlanded with glory.

It was dumb to consider OWA to begin with…my host has an analytics package already installed. I actually hadn’t ever used it before. I opened the correct URL and gorblimey! Despite my having published the URL to this test blog absolutely nowhere, lots of you seem to be finding the place all right. If Pets.com were getting these numbers, then the sock puppet wouldn’t be battling Gary Coleman for dumpster scraps behind the iHOP.

I’ve never had blog stats before. There were ways of figuring out how much traffic my AppleScript blog was pulling, but I was never interested in seeing the data. It seemed that if the numbers were too low or too high, it’d affect the experiment, so to speak.

But I can see that I’ve been missing out. Someone typed “philosophers are morons” into a search engine, and they landed here. I’m also pleased to learn that there are apparently a large number of Swedes reading this.

Howdy, Swedes! I don’t feel that there are enough people out there sucking up to your fine nation and soliciting your patronage. Allow me to correct that immediately. The next paragraph contains a valuable tip that will increase the performance of any PC or Mac by a minimum of 40%, via a simple four-minute installation of a component that can be purchased at any corner store for less than three dollars:

You will not be able to read the above text unless your IP address resolves to a .se domain.

Moving onward: I downloaded a WordPress plugin that’s supposed to work with my analytics package and no, that didn’t work either.

The rest of the evening was spent in matters of philosophy. A message board continues to be a good idea, but I might have to talk to the admin of my server to get that up and running because the instructions for installing bbPress (for example) make the whole procedure look like home dentistry.

But I think I need to start looking hard at what’s out there and settling on a board app because the more I think about it the better this idea sounds. I think an Ihnatko board would attract dozens of posts a month rather than hundreds or thousands, but it would make me feel good to know that I have message threads set up for people who want to get support for my books or have other kinds of interactions that can only clumsily be handled via podcasts, blogs, and emails.

And then I revisited the hoary First Page question. I think I’ve settled on a layout for this here blog. I have it all drawn up on a sheet of notebook paper and everything.

But it’s the same question I asked at the very beginning: when someone types “ihnatko.com” or “cwob.com” into a browser, do I want them to wind up right here? Or should I establish a sort of “lobby” that would appeal to first-timer visitors?

I’ve been leaning against the lobby (and told to move along by hotel security; apparently they have a serious “no riff-raff” policy). But while I was loitering there I’d sort of concluded that a separate front page would be a waste of space.

But tonight I saw some of the awesome design work being done by Mule Design Studio and it’s kind of turned me around on the idea. A front page like that — and the front page like the one they designed for All Things Digital — really sells the idea of having a powerful answer to the question “Just who the hell are you people anyway?” You see it and you want to come on in and look around.

Hmm. Yeah, a front page with a quick bio, a highlighted blog post, column, podcast, and Flickr photo, a promo for one or two of my books. That could work. But at this stage I dunno how that page would roll. Would I have to keep updating it manually, or would I have to build some PHP scripts to generate it automatically? Either way, that’s work. More work than not having a front page, anyway.

Okay, well, I’ve managed to waste even more time by blogging about how I’m wasting time. It’s amazing that I continue to claim that this blog is only in beta because it seems to me like it’s just passed the only credible test for a functioning blog.

Still, miles to go, miles to go.

Andy -

Me again. You mentioned earlier that you prolly want to set up your new WordPress theme so that posts that fall into specific categories (like the Sun-Times columns) get their own special title treatments and stuff. This blog post explains how to do that.

Technically, it’s for a specific theme that these folks have put together, but it ought to work with any theme. Just thought you’d like to have this URL handy when you need it.

Dear Andy,

You need to locate the following things for the blog:

• A really good image plugin. The mojo that comes with WordPress is okay, but it’s klugey. Your AppleScript tool would automatically scale the image to the right size and it would even center it within the column. Imagine! Centering an image! You ought to be able to find a plug-in or something that works just as well.
• A guide to widgets. It seems like most of the things you want to put in the sidebar(s) are easier to accomplish with widgets than with the scripts you were going to write. I know you’ve been busy but I bet there’s a master directory, like the one for plugins.
• A menu package. Like Tigra Menus, maybe. You’re going to need drop-down menus under the masthead for site navigation (links to podcasts, the local Sun-Times archive, etc.) I think Tigra Menus requires that you leave empty space for the menus. Or actually, maybe there’s something even neater than simple dropdowns (wheels? I dunno).
• Prolly a good idea to at least look around at message board software. A message board is definitely not a Phase 1 thing, but it’ll be easier to incorporate when the time comes if you start preparing for it now, when the site is still being designed.
• An RSS solution. Feedburner, I think, is your default…but is it really the best choice? You’re still unclear on what, precisely, Feedburner will do for you. Apart from site metrics (which you’re not terrible interested in yet) and allowing the RSS feed to “travel” if need be. WordPress’ baked-right-in feed seems to be working well; already this non-public blog is getting way more search hits than the AppleScripted one you’ve had up for years. But on the whole, it’s time to get less dumb on this particular topic.
• A calendar widget or plugin or something. Remember how you wanted to be able to have your upcoming appearances automatically populate into a little agenda thingy in Yellowtext’s sidebar? But you gave up when you discovered that (shockingly) iCal’s AppleScript support doesn’t allow you to retrieve the next (x) upcoming events without loading in the entire calendar and then sorting manually. I bet there’s a widget or something that hooks into Google Calendar or somesuch.
• Maybe it’s time to get an Amazon partner thing. You’re hoping to use the blog to help people to find your books and stuff. Why not get an extra few pennies when they buy ‘em by clicking your link? But hmm…probably a good idea to figure out how to make that work through Barnes & Noble as well. They’re giving the iPhone book a lot of play in their holiday catalogue and you don’t want to play favorites.
• If you can’t commit to a specific design yet, at least decide on a theme generator or template. Again, I know you’ve been busy and I’m glad that you’ve been keeping a list of design notes. You’ve also chosen a great color palette. But if you’re going to have the Celestial House of Bandwidth open “wide” when the iPhone book is released, well sir, the first week of December is going to come up reallll quick.
• Also a good idea to get an “post via email” solution going. You installed a kewl plugin that gives you full admin access from the iPhone, and that actually delivers 90% of the “post remotely” functions that you wanted. But the day will come when you’ll be glad you had basic email posting wired up and ready to go. I know you couldn’t get it working during the first couple of days but you barely tried.
• Oh, and look for more Flickr plugins. There has to be a great one out there. You put lots of terrific content upon Flickr and what you’d like to be able to do is simply cross-post an album between the blog and the Flickr stream. As yet, you’ve wired up Flickr’s own “post to blog” feature (which doesn’t work the way a well-designed tool ought to) and you’ve stumbled across a bunch of Flickr plug-ins that let you embed an album. But I think the perfect thing awaits your discovery.
• Ditto for YouTube functions and podcast plug-ins. Every month you have more video to link to (thank you, CBS) and maybe there’s a better way to do that than just to paste the stock YouTube embed. Something like a gallery or theater? Similarly, it’d be great to drive podcasts straight from the site. Make sure you’re backing a winning horse.

Okay, that’s pretty much it for now, Andy. I know you’ll be kicking into high gear on these things once the Leopard book is finished but it doesn’t hurt to make a list so it’s always handy. Plus, despite the fact that you’re keeping this beta blog low-key, folks might see this list and leave their own suggestions.

Your Pal - Andy.

Had a brilliant idea today: a “Mortal Combat”-style fighting game in which all of the combatants are not particularly noted for being physically intimidating, to the point of downright milquetoastery.

Playable characters include:

• Eddie Deezen
• Mr. Bean
• George Costanza
• Pee-Wee Herman
• Paul Lynde
• Rick Moranis (as Louis Tully from “Ghostbusters”)
• Larry David
• Woody Allen
• Dr. Smith from “Lost In Space”
• Milhouse Van Houten
• Don Knotts (as Barney Fife)
• Don Knotts (as Ralph Furley) (Unlockable player)
• Niles Crane
• John Waters
• Arnold Horshack
• Clark Kent (in the presence of Lois Lane) (before she learned that he’s Superman)
• Charles Nelson-Reilly
• The black guy from “Designing Women”
• Moby
• Arnold Stang
• The middle guy from “Blue Man Group”
• Mel Cooley (from “The Dick Van Dyke Show”)
• Matthew Broderick
• David Spade
• Dick Cavett
• Patton Oswalt (as Spence on “The King Of Queens”)
• Patton Oswalt (as himself)

Most common fighting style: lots of slapping, not many shots landing because combatant has his other arm wrapped around his head, eyes clamped shut, most of upper body twisted as far away from fight as possible. AKA Boku Nerd Floating Monkey-Style.

Typical fatalities: Curling up in defensive fetal position and accidentally tumbling off of fighting platform; crying so hard that combatant passes out from dehydration; dropped asthma inhaler.