I swear that title is an unintentional bit of 80’s lyrics hilarity. Seems appropriate though, since I’ve been amusing myself tweaking various [tag]wordpress[/tag] error messages to display U2 or Talking Heads lyrics. Why have I been doing this? I’m glad you asked.

This whole redesign started because I wanted to add a wordpress plug-in, a harmless little critter called [tag]Now Reading[/tag]. Let’s face it, this site was an ugly mess that was being held together by chewing gum, duct tape, and 404 errors. A template upgrade was hardly a waste of time. It could, however, have taken up less time.

I installed the Now Reading plug-in and then remembered that my template doesn’t support [tag]widgets[/tag]. I had a whole bunch of shiny new widget-ready templates stashed in a file, but when I looked at them again I decided I hated them all. So I tracked down this nice template, downloaded it, uploaded it, messed around with it, decided to keep it.

Then I activated the plug-in and couldn’t get the damned thing to work. I butchered some php, broke my site, fixed my site, broke my site again, fixed it again. Then I went and broke the Internet. Eventually, I realized Comcast had broken the Internet and reset our router.

Then there was more of the editing and the swearing. I’ve actually run out of obscenities, so if you have some extras lying around I may need to borrow them. At least I had the good sense to backup the site (twice, to two different locations) before I started messing things up.

Maybe you should go check out [tag]Catalog Choice[/tag], a brilliant non-profit webservice that helps you escape from catalog mailing lists. It might be safer than hanging around in here today.