OK, so…I have posts brewing in my cranium about my recent viewing of Milk and another entry into my “The Best Bands You’ve (Probably) Never Heard Of” series, but I just wanted to take a moment here to give some props to some perspicacious peeps. (OK, white girl…enough of that unless you’re talking about marshmallow birds!)

I just wanted to thank all the people who’ve written the really neat WordPress plugins, like the über-sweet iWPhone Plugin+Theme from ContentRobot I mentioned in a previous post, that give my site some of its whiz-bang features that I find so useful and neat. Those of you reading this on LiveJournal need to head over to my real blog now so you can see what the hell it is I’m on about.

First, the “broadcasters.” I loves me some “wrote-once, publish everywhere” functionality, let me tell you! And thanks to the makers of Twitpress, Wordbook, and Live+Press, my posts are announced on Twitter and Facebook and re-posted on LiveJournal, respectively. So, to Tom Purnell (Twitpress), Robert Tsai (Wordbook), and Tania Morell (Live+Press…and BTW rock on, sista! ), thank you! You all rock…out loud.

One single geek named Robert Felty is responsible for 3 separate plugins — Collapsing Archives, Collapsing Categories, and Collapsing Links — which enable me to make my archives, categories, and links all collapse (imagine that!) nicely under their headings. Because of him, my sidebar is manageable and silky-smooth, without any split ends or frizzies! Rock on, Robert, and thanks very much indeed.

My blog is also deeply enriched by Google-y goodness thanks to some seriously geekly geeks. Ronald Heft, Jr. is responsible for Google Analyticator, which makes dealing with Google Analytics that much easier. I only have the alias, “linewbie,” to thank for wrangling Google AdSense with All in One Adsense and YPN. Arne Brachhold gives me the Google XML Sitemaps plugin, which ensures that a full sitemap of my blog site is submitted to Google (and some other search engines) periodically. Finally, thanks to Libin Pan and Michael Klein and Google AJAX Translation, my comments can be translated into a whole slew of languages. Unfortunately, that only works on the first 500 characters of blog posts for now, so I have that feature turned off…but I’m hoping to be able to use it for posts in their entirety soon, too! Thanks to all of you.

And, speaking of comments, it’s only thanks to Ronald Huereca that I have the seriously sweet WP Ajax Edit Comments plugin which makes commenting on my posts so swanky and smooth. You all should try it sometime. It isn’t painful, I promise.

The tag cloud in my sidebar is pretty gratuitous, but the effort that went into designing that particular piece of Flashified goodness wasn’t. So I give many, many thanks indeed to Roy Tanck for WP-Cumulus.

The good people at ShareThis make it easy for all of my readers (all four of you) to share my posts with an uncaring world on innumerable social bookmarking sites and via several other means as well. You guys and gals kick much booty! Now, if only my readers would actually use it and get me some deeply undeserved internet fame and more eyeballs to get me that mad AdSense money. (I could be a hundredaire by next quarter. Money…power…friends…influence!)

cformsII is one seriously big and bad-ass plugin of whose functionality I’m currently using only a shameful fraction to power my “contact me” page. But I’m glad it’s there and it’s so capable, ’cause I just know I’m going to find more uses for it sooner or later. My hat is off to you both, Nicki and Oliver at delicious:days.

And, finally (well, for now…), to all the fine people who keep WordPress blogs as spam-free as humanly and algorithmically possible, my deep, abiding, and eternal gratitude! Matt Mullenweg’s Akismet plug-in comes with every single copy of WordPress for a damned good reason, and Joe Tan’s TanTanNoodles Simple Spam Filter is no slouch either. May they both keep the trolls and errant Nigerians with cash-flow problems away from me for a long, long time.

Thanks to ingenious WordPress Plugin developers, my posts on this blog from now on will be automatically tweeted on Twitter and re-posted to my previously-useless LiveJournal account I maintained only to view my friends’ friends-only posts. Facebook is already importing my posts as “Notes” items via RSS without any need to install anything into my WordPress setup. Now, if I can only get my post re-posted on my Tribe blog and my Free-Association blog so I can truly “write once, publish everywhere”, I’ll be in techno-nirvana. Of course, being an admin on Free-Ass and having the lead developer as a personal friend kinda helps there.

Well, well, well…

I have to actually take back a bit of my earlier vitriol toward Microsoft. I re-did the layout in a much more “standards-compliant” way, applying what I learned from my first stab at it, and suddenly the site renders dandily in IE7 along with Safari 3.x (and other Webkit-based browsers) and Firefox 3.x (and other Gecko-based browsers). Hurray!

IE6 is still a mess, though, and that’s not getting fixed. Update your browsers, people!

And Opera people, I know the Twitter box is positioning itself up at the top, but I really just don’t have the time to track that one down for a browser that idiosyncratic. Please, for the love of all that’s holy, go with one of the many other fine Webkit or Gecko browsers available if you don’t want to use Firefox or Safari. 

Here’s a partial list:

• Chrome (Windows-only for now, Webkit-based)
• Flock (Windows & Mac, Gecko-based)
• Camino (Mac, Gecko-based)
• SeaMonkey (Windows & Mac, Gecko-based)
• OmniWeb (Mac, Webkit-based)
• Shiira (Mac, Webkit-based)
• Cruz (Mac, Webkit-based)

If you can’t find something on that list that’s better than Opera in every conceivable respect, I’ll eat my hat. Flock, in particular, is probably of interest to all you social browsers out there, what with its very clever integration with many commonly-used web services. If I used more of them than I do, I’d probably switch.

OK. Now, on to more writing of content!

OK. Safari 3.1.2 and Firefox 3.0.3 are both rendering the site nicely. It took some doing, but I managed to eliminate the “seams” and fix a few other visual glitches as well. My site should now be positively beeyooteefull on the two major standards-compliant browsers. That just leaves the evil that is IE7. I have a feeling that one’s just plain not going to be easy and I’m going to have to consult with CSS gurus on making that one work anything resembling the way I want it to.

Oh yeah…I added some nice sidebar widgets to enable collapsing of various groupings and the gratuitous Flash-enhanced tag-cloud. Yay.

I sleep now!

I have things working really well in Safari/WebKit, pretty well in Firefox/Gecko, and not so much in IE. I’m going to work on getting an IE7-specific stylesheet going, though. I’m just not bothering with the CSS-rendering nightmare that is IE6. If you have IE6, why haven’t you upgraded? Or, better yet, switch to Firefox already. (Have I mentioned I hate IE? Standards, M$…you’re doing it wrong!)