I’m thinking this is a good thing in the long haul, but in the short term, it is creating a headache and is more than a little distressing. I’ve been thinking for awhile about the firewall between my martial arts me and Darwin Atheist me, and it is time to merge the two.

Some other weird stuff going on in the background that I will get to as time permits. Lately I’ve been involved on some of the Meetup boards about where to go and what to do, which doesn’t help you much, I do understand.

It isn’t that I haven’t been writing, trust me, it’s just that what I have been writing hasn’t been the general news thing, which some of you are signing on for.

One of the the good things about being the only Gavin Impett is I’m not so hard to find, should someone want to find me. As a fairly private person, it is always something of a shock when something I write actually gets back to me, by someone who read it.

In the world of Martial arts and JKD land in particular, this can be something of a problem , but in the words of the prophet, sometimes you just have to say fuck it.

And that is where I am at with the current situation with my little in the park group. They are happy to support me and endure the type of stupidity meetup is heaping on them, so be it.

I’m going to a different writing format, which is a bit more suitable to this sort of thing.  And I may even put google ads back on my site. We shall see.

So what does this plugin do, it creates a sitemap. Install it from the wordpress depository, place the code into the desired page’s writing section (whatever the official name is for whatever I’m writing now) and you are more or less done. The default sets the links at 50, so at some point, I may add more pages, but in the meantime, it works. total time from start to finish, maybe five minutes.

Again, I actually have more time to write about the plugin than it does to figure out how to make the thing work. It is well documented and it makes me happy. Aaaaahhhh. WordPress plugin goodness.  The homepage of the sitemap creator is here.  Throw money at him.

They work, play nice on this site, have usable installation instructions and do not waste hours of my day in trying to figure out if they work or not, and if so how.

For instance, I set this post to sticky. That means it should stay on the top of the post thread. Is that happening? No. Why? Figuring out why, that can take a long time. If by setting the post to sticky and then the post stays at the position I set it to, then I would say all is right with the world, but since it’s not, I can point out the joy of working with this thing.

There are more reasons why a specific plugin is bad,  than there are plugins, and thus a thread devoted to exploring the ways a plugin can offend.

I will cheerfully point out I am an idiot who should not be allowed next to a writing instrument that in some manner uses electricity. Any yet here I am.  And I’m not going to learn css beyond the most rudimentary cut and past functions. I can do that – willing to read code, but when it comes to writing code, don’t know how, don’t want to learn.

• Egregious time suck. I don’t care how easy a plugin is to install, I can download, unpack, ftp, upload, and activate in a minute or so, or I can do a search and install automatically. So  reading “easy to install,” kinda makes me angry. I already know that. An airplane is easy to fly, you turn the key like you do with a car, and they don’t have roads or traffic signs, how hard can it be?
• Instructions are not in English, ever. You would think this is a no-brainer, since WordPress’s post up language is essentially English, but then again, the French. Need I say more. The interesting thing is, when I was in Paris, The Parisians actually hated this belligerent arrogance and many French speaking people apologized to me for the behavior of their countrymen who could help, but chose not to communicate in English, because then I would know what was said.
• Actionable instructions don’t exist on the developer’s site and may only be found by doing a google search inevitably landing on some other poor lost soul’s site, who wasted a day of their life doing exactly the same thing.
• Does not play nice with others. Some plugins interfere with other plugins, this is especially true when upgrading WordPress bug fixes, which mercifully has slowed down a bit.

This is an off-shoot, resurrection of my long gone but never forgotten, Okay How web-site, which caused no end of hilarity amongst my readers as I confronted the insanity of the people who really want to help you, have put together this really cool tool, but have no clue how to inform someone of the steps necessary to make it work. The idea of the site was simple and I thought harmless enough, basically when someone insists that something works, simply ask the question “Okay How?” and step back, delighting in the dumbfounded expression, when it suddenly occurs to their expanded brain mass, that some people want to use their cool gizmo and don’t know or care how the code is, they only want to know how it works.

If  we all had to build a car from scratch every time we went to work, guess what, we’d find another form of transportation.

Remember kids, I was around before hard-drives, I’ve really rubbed elbows to the gods of this stuff who really don’t interact with humans the way most folks do, and I really have had people try to put me in a room with servers that was not meant for human habitation because I just wouldn’t shut up about it.

And keep in mind, I recently got into an hour long discussion and wrote a preliminary affidavit to the affect with a lawyer who called to argue out the jury that I was on why we were wrong. Someday I will be able to link to that post, Wiki style, but not today.

Next problem child on the block, Apture. I like the plug-in, but it kills the page load speed at my end. I’m waiting for more than 10 seconds before I can write word one and the words are coming up a bit on the slow side. I am not pleased.

It’s a cool,  cold, unsentimental world in web-land, I do say.

The other plugin that is probably short for this life is permalink helper, a worthy plugin that seemed to kill my pages. Turns out that is a WPRemix issue – the design of that theme requires each page have its own code which must be removed.

Still no love with the permalink helper.

A permalink is the address that allows the internet to find you. Think of it as good directions vs. bad directions to your house. In this case think of your house as a place where your friends will arrive happy or angry at you. If your house is your business, and you are giving out a bad address. People may continue to slog on to your place, but quite a few are going to take it personally and not show up.

So one of the things, many of the sages recommend is to adjust the permalink structure to /%category%/%posts%/

In fact, if you choose to set your permalink structure up this way, it is right there on the wordpress permalink page.

Fair enough, I recently attended a wordpress SEO optimization wit that as a recommended structure. I am staring at a sheet by an expert who appears on television spreading this sage wisdom. Elsewhere, I came across similar advice and set my permalink structure to /posts%/

I was actively attempting to change my structure to /%category%/%posts%/ using the permalink helper plugin and came across this

Nice, so the preferred structure is /%year%/%post%/ not what  my expert is telling beginners. I see this all the time in the martial arts world, they forget really simple rules they are skillful enough to ignore, but end up giving people who are just starting out a really bad foundation. So where does this rule really bite you, if you are planning a site with many pages. Hint I’m already in the thirties and as I said,  several thousand poems are looking for a home.

Do it once, get it right.

That out of the way, even though this post is a bit short on the length and info department, I did get some work done and the information is more or less on the page.

I cleaned up several errors today on the site and more or less moved it into a presentable mode, with the goal and eye towards more focus on the writing and less on the get up and running.

All the rss feeds work now, which is very cool, which gives me a couple of navigation ideas, that someone no doubt has already figured out a way to make work.

It is something that I want to do exactly once, but am resigned to doing repeatedly. There are several advantages of spreading one’s self so thin, I am a told, if only by myself, but in truth, I enjoy tinkering and getting this thing to work has dragged on long enough.

So why Itheme’s Builder? Having followed the development of WordPress from the early days of not so many years ago, when Matt Mullenweg was just some guy sitting in the back of a room, not sure why everyone was being so kind to him.

The point of this wordpress thing is to make it easier for human beings to express themselves. Back in the old days, it was necessary to have and install for each subject (yes, kids, there was a time before categories) and good luck if you wanted a different page layout than the basic blogging tool.

This changed quickly with the realization that human beings such as myself were willing to open up their pocket books to have someone do most of the heavy lifting for them.

Enter WPRemix, a very, very, cool developers tool. But again, for someone like myself, who needs both poetry pages and video pages, still limited and you are back to where you started from, basically designing the site from scratch, if that is what you want to do. For a template type design, it is still a pretty good way to do, if you are okay with modifying pre-built pages.

Enter builder, around the beginning of this past year. What makes it different is it supports something called child themes, which is a big deal.

Back in the old days, there was only one black box, if you will. Whatever WordPress was, that is what you got. Then WordPress users figured out ways to make WordPress look different, with things called themes and all was good, until you tried to update WordPress, then maybe your theme and your site wouldn’t work any more.

The solution so far is to break the black box into three parts, worpress, which can be updated, a parent theme, that interacts with wordpress, and a child theme that interacts with the parent theme, and even a little doll theme for kiddy theme, if you are following me so far.

Much to my amazement, it works. The advantage to me is, I can have several different subjects AKA categories, that actually look different depending on the subject. I am aware that not everyone who comes onto my site for is going to want to delve into the other stuff.

It is a start and the aesthetics of the place is starting to make sense to me. Form shapes function by spiraling interaction.

Keep in mind I have a couple of novels, two non-fiction books, five or six screenplays, various comedy scripts, several thousand poems, several thousand photos, a short movie, Martial arts demo videos, that need a structured home. Trust me, I looked at a lot of packages along the way.

WordPress is the one that really serves the writer and does not force the technology, it gets out of the way. That being said, this thing has really grown in the past three years. My head shakes when I think of what has happened since it began.
That being said,