I probably won’t get tonight’s Vampire Diaries recap up until Friday night, because I’ve been in DC all week, and haven’t slept for more than four hours in the last two ten days.

This week’s Vampire Diaries recap will be a bit late. I’ve got a very important presentation to prepare for at work, and all of our laptops lit on fire this week, so I’m kind of scrambling. I hope to have it up sometime tomorrow afternoon.

I finally broke down and created a category for all of my Twilight related posts. Out of all of them, the two you’re probably most interested in are the Twilight: the Movie recap (which I really need to reformat; I hadn’t quite hit on the distilled layout when I wrote that), and the Twilight: New Moon recap, which my server logs tell me is the reason a bunch of you are here anyway. Welcome aboard!

You can also look through my Vampire Diaries: Season One recaps, which my server logs tell me is the reason most of the rest of you are here. Welcome to you, too! I’m going to finish out Season One, and when Season Two comes along, it’ll get its own category.

In non-Thomas related news, if you’re looking for another Twilight fix, I can’t recommend Cleolinda Jones’ recaps strongly enough: Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, Breaking Dawn Part I, Breaking Dawn Part II, Breaking Dawn Part III, Midnight Sun I, Midnight Sun II, Twilight in Fifteen Minutes, New Moon in Fifteen Minutes. Whew.

I’m also a fan of Mark Reads Twilight, and while his recaps aren’t as good-natured as Cleo’s, I get a real kick out of them. He’s reviewed the entire published series, and is working on Midnight Sun right now.

I decided to finally acknowledge the “Please Update your WordPress” message that’s been nagging me for the last month or so, and decided to do it during the middle of the day, because I like to live on the edge.

Can I just say, I love how easy it is to upgrade this platform? The full instructions are here, but really, it boils down to “Delete these directories. Copy these files. Be careful about these ones. Visit this page, and click this button.” The whole thing took me less than half an hour, and most of that was waiting for files to transfer.

I’m also rolling up my sleeves and trying to remember PHP, so I can fix the layout of the comments section. You know, now that people are actually commenting. ;-)

Edit

Formatting comments was easier than I had feared. The author name and timestamp – along with a permalink to the comment – now appear at the top of each comment, inside of a light gray header. This should make it easier to distinguish between comments.

I’ve also turned on HTML for the comments, so you can do things like <b>bold</b> and <i>italicize</i> your comments, or add <a href=”http://www.thomas-galvin.com”>links</a>.

Finally, I added a spoiler class to the site’s CSS, so if you want to mention something that might be considered a spoiler, mark it up like this:

<span class=”spoiler”>Darth Vader is Luke’s father!</span>

Which will show up like this (swipe to read):

Darth Vader is Luke’s father!

Today, I read an article describing how JournalSpace.com lost six years’ worth of people’s blogs, an event which was probably due to malicious intent, and which was certainly due to a poor backup scheme. This provoked two immediate reactions:

1. Wow, sucks to be you.
2. Hey, I better go make a quick backup of all of my data. Twice.

WordPress, the blog engine I use to run my site, has a handy import/export feature, and 17.9 megabytes later, I now have a local copy of every post that I have ever written, which is also backed up in MacOS’s Time Machine.

Since I was playing around in the site’s admin area anyway, I did a little New Year’s cleaning. First, I changed the layout a little, making the “Categories” sidebar wider, so “Things That Make Me Angry (1,000,000)” doesn’t wrap to two lines anymore. I also moved the sidebar over to the right hand side, but I don’t know if I like that or not.

Second, and more importantly, I added a bunch of new categories, including one for each series I’ve done. So, now, if you want to find something from my “Changes that Heal” or “Failing in Baltimore” posts, for example, they’re nothing but a hyperlink away.

And since most of you are reading this on FaceBook, it absolutely does not matter.

C’est la vie.

I’m kind of tired of doing all of m blog management by hand, and I’m too lazy to write (another) content management system from scratch, so I’m installing WordPress on my site. I’ll be transferring most of my content over to this blog in the next few days.