For the last several days, I’ve been trying to update my blog to use a layout I created. Each time I sat down to work on changing WordPress’ default template (named Kubrick), my brain would seemingly click off and refuse to concentrate. It was as if looking at CSS and PHP was the same as those crazy anime scenes that gave all those kids seisures. Half the time I would just stare blankly at the screen waiting for something to happen. I kept searching for tutorials with the hope that maybe there was some super easy way to do what I wanted and that, somehow, I’d skipped over it the last time I did the same exact search.

Fast forward a few days, several glasses of iced tea, and a lot of research later and here’s my newly updated blog. Of course once I figured out the bigger picture, like using my own header image or using a custom background for the page element only, the little details started to kick my ass…like, how to make that whole header image a link and why that custom page background didn’t seem to be repeating correctly. I found work arounds to most of the problems I encountered.

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I just spent the last two hours wasting my time trying to install Movable Type. I wanted to give it a try, to see if I preferred it over Word Press and, more generally, just to check it out. I made three different attempts to upload and install the software (20mb unzipped); each try failed for the same reason. The whole process is bloated, the set up and installation is not user friendly for both geeks and non-geeks alike, and the small sampling of online support files Movable Type has available are outdated and flawed, to say the least.

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Recently I needed to make a map of driving directions from my house to multiple destinations. I knew that an option on the popular online map sites probably existed, but I’d never looked. I checked MapQuest, but it didn’t seem to have anything close to what I was looking for. Beyond that, it seems that lately MapQuest has been a little on the lacking side when it comes to giving accurate directions. I ended up checking Google Maps and found that they had exactly what I neeeded…and a lot more.

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Good morning,

This is my first post, a test of how this system works and what I can try to do to change things.