It’s a few days later, but I’ve upgraded my wordpress installation, and y’all should too. If you’re upgrading (as opposed to installing), you might want to check out Mark at Wordpress’ zipfile of changed files that makes upgrading much easier (and safer in some ways, especially with regard to the wp-content directory) than trying to use the whole enchildada from WP’s download repository.

Serves me right for neglecting this blog for so long. Anyone reading this who wants to consider themelves tagged may go right ahead with it. Let’s see:

Gained or lost weight? Same, actually.
Longer or shorter hair? Shorter.
Nearsighted or farsighted? Neither . I’ve got astigmatism instead.
More money or less? Sigh. About the same. Probably slightly less.
Spent more or spent less? About the same.
Moved more or less? Living in the same place.
The most stupid plan? I honestly can’t think of any. I plan things out, and stay out of trouble.
The most dangerous endeavour? Hm. Perhaps working on electrical wiring in my house? With a skilled electrician, mind you, but still.
The most expensive purchase? I think that would be the saltillo tile for the patio I tiled over the summer.
The most delicious meal? OK, this is a tough one. So many good meals. Probably one of my mother’s masterpieces. (She’s really good.)
The most impressing book? Shouldn’t this be “impressive”? An Inconvenient Truth.
The most impressing movie? I finally saw Abyss.
The best CD? I discovered Fiona Apple this year, so I’ll say Tidal.
The most impressive concert? Finally saw a Blue Man concert. WOOT.
Spent the most time with… Someone near to me.
Spent the most quality time with… Someone near to me.
Predominant feeling 2006? Can this year PLEASE be over with?
Done for the first time in 2006? Flew out to a job interview. Cool.
Done again after a long pause in 2006? Blogging. <grin>
Three things I could have well done without?. Hmph. A close relative’s illness, a missed deadline, and losing a dog.
The latest hobby I took up? Flickr!
The nicest present I gave someone? Hand made quilts.
2006 summarized in one word: Goodbye (and good riddance).

Paolo has been kind enough to translate into Italian an article I wrote detailing how to put together a simple wordpress plugin. The translation may be found here, and I have added the text to the article itself at the end. Thank you for your hard work; I only know a little Italian but it looks good to me & I’m pleased that its available to a wider audience.

Roger Johansson (of 456 Berea Street) and Lorelle VanFossen both remind us that the new Internet Explorer has been released into the wild and what does that mean for all our web pages?

I want to point out that Internet Explorer really has three main versions right now. (I have to support multiple platforms, so this sort of thing is a large concern for me). IE7 is intended only for XP and Vista. Anyone who has not migrated to either of these platforms will use IE6. Since Win2K is pretty decent, and there’s a lot of people out there who haven’t bothered to shell out for the bigger badder etc computer, I expect that the web pages I work on will continue to have a substantial proportion of IE6 users. So the IE6 bugs remain a real and ongoing concertn.

In testing with IE7, we have noticed that there can be different behavior between IE7 on XP and IE7 on Vista! Now, some of this may be due to the different beta versions of Vista — I believe we’ve gone through at least two updates on Vista beta. However the possibility remains very high that IE7XP and IE7Vista will behave differently from each other as well.

So now that means three platforms to support in place of one!

In any case I’m aware that IE7 does not handle this website gracefully even though IE6 does, as you can see in this screen shot.

OK, thanks to Brian Layman who did some additional detective work, it turns out there’s a beta release available to plug the security issue. I haven’t installed it yet since I’m not in the position of being seriously compromised by having lots of registered users or comment activity, but for those WordPress bloggers with bigger setups or who don’t want to use the workaround, there are beta versions of WP 2.0.4 (which itself looks to have a stable release out in a few days, which is what I’m waiting for). Check Brian’s article for the latest beta downloads, it looks like they’re being pretty frequently updated right now.