It’s snowing in Redmond.

Yeah, I know, not odd for New England even in early December, but it’s very odd for Redmond. At least from what I’ve been told. I believe it, in a way: when there was .25″ in Redmond last year, people panicked or frolicked at the sight of it. Today alone, six different people stopped in my office to tell me it was snowing. I didn’t mind, honestly… I mean I have no windows, so I wouldn’t know otherwise, and well – I find the enthusiasm over the first snowfall in at least two years to be endearing…

After all, before I started driving, snow was a fun event to me… I almost like seeing it: new setting, no “it’s going to be slick tonight!” reminder via phone call every other hour, and frankly, it’s comical to see it on campus… it looks outta place.

What else is strange today?

I reloaded the blog. When I first started blogging, I was working with a client that had four entry fields… I wanted one for Keywords but the field wasn’t there, so I used the Excerpt field for my “relevant searches”, which is represented by the butterfly image that goes with each post. Some of them make sense; some of them make me laugh – either way it’s a nice to have. Now a days, though, there is a keyword field supplied by MT/TypePad, but I didn’t bother to support it… why change all the existing posts to use it?

Why indeed. Since TypePad no longer shows the last 25 posts per category, I’ve had to redirect all of the posts to the “Archive by Category” page. Since that only showed titles, I thought it would be nice to include some post text… I noticed a blurb that said “If tell a post to post an Excerpt and it doesn’t have one, it will show the first 20 words of the Entry Body would be shown with an ellipse”. oO! Problem was that I was already using the Excerpt field… *grumble*

In addition to this, I concerned scrapping my own templates for the built in TypePad templates… less maintenance and with RSS, I figured, what the hell, right? Wrong. There’s all types of things that I’d lose… like custom layout of web parts. The entire footer bar. The custom menu system with images… meh. The biggest issue is that of Entry Body and Extended Entry… since I’ve been showing only the Entry Body on the front page and only the Extended Entry on the full page, there was a lot of duplicate text… *sigh*

822 hand edited posts later, and the changes have been made: I deleted all of the existing posts and imported all of the tweaked posts. It actually went quite well, in all honest… oh, I still don’t have working Category pages, but still: the Archive page looks much better. It’s massive, but it’s more useful, until I can get another solution to the first problem…

Also noticed that one of the RSS feeds was pretty hosed. Fixed that up. Tweaked all of the templates so you shouldn’t even notice a difference at this point… provided that I remember not to use the Excerpt field and don’t copy and paste the Body around… I already did both for this post and had to change it!

I have to admit that as I went through the collection of entries that there were some that I almost didn’t put back… and others that I wanted to re-post as new. Hard to believe that I’ve been publishing entries here for over four years now!

I also spent some time pruning down my running processes on my ThinkPad… back down to 41, which includes the Search daemons and Anti-Viral programs… there was a whole bunch of crap running there all of a sudden… like a security applications for VPN when I wasn’t on the VPN. A log manager for the Lenovo HD protection thingy? No idea what that was doing… My favorite was seeing HTTP SSL running when I don’t have an HTTP server on the box. And that little prick was huge. Good ’bout of cleaning, basically… and stuff still works! Nice to see.

Doesn’t change the fact that it’s still feckin snowing here.