I've been thinking about this for a while, and finally decided to do the jump today. Which, of course, meant there were immediate and nasty repercussions.

I've imported all my users, entries, comments, and categories into drupal. Why is a long story, and one that's likely to come out over the course of the next few days, but it's been brewing for a few months. It has had no small influence on my hesitation to post here.

First, I must extend thanks and gratitude to Megan of rapunzellstower.com and Kyle of fidgeting.net, whose seemingly-unrelated bug reports, two months apart, provided the solution to an ugly Quarto bug I had repeatedly glimpsed but been unable to personally reproduce.

Silly domesticat. (Most of my bug reports start like that.) Two months of off-and-on hunting for this bug, which consisted of seven characters in one file being misplaced. Which ones, you ask?

Oh, the closing FORM tag.

Two new features implemented as of today.  I'd be funnier about all this, but I'm tired, in the middle of squashing an ugly bug I just found this morning, and my sense of humor went off to have a four-martini lunch somewhere around noon.  It's nearly four hours later, and it hasn't bothered to stagger back in to work yet.  Wanker.

Notation #1: Quarto is now at version 0.8. Prior to their mass genocide at the hands of their dictatorial (and stylishly jackbooted) leadership, the peasants rejoiced.

Possibly the most exquisitely funny part of creating one's own CMS (content management system) is the joy of writing one's own tooltips - a long, tedious, and generally loathsome process that provides endless opportunities to slide in examples of one's highly warped sense of humor.

See also today's attempt to explain to Joe Unknown User on the purposes of a 'blurb':

Day two, Quarto coding extravaganza.  We are coming to you live from the same chair that 98% of most cat.net entries are typed from; the only difference is that today I've spent most of my waking hours in this chair and not doing actually productive things.

Jeff wins the Write Amy An Import Script So She'll Shut Up™ award; we tested it tonight against the entries of geek-chick.net and guess what?  It worked.  No complaints, no quibbles - once I remembered to tell it the correct server paths to grab the files from, it imported in less than twenty seconds.I'm just...flabbergasted.

Tomorrow begins the Great Big Odyssey.  I can import the entries as I feel like it, but that's just the backend.  I can dump as much info into the db as I want, but no one is going to be able to see any of it until I work on the display pages that actually pull the information out, format it, and make it available for reading.

Tonight: disco coding night in the house of the domesticat. I've been holed up in the computer room for a good chunk of the day, rotating through my collection of disco mp3s, patching up what fell somewhere between an oversight and a security hole in Quarto.

Yes, Quarto - remember that project? I seem to be back on track, in the way that a train barrelling down the track at Mach 2 could be described as being vaguely "on track."

Sorry to bust in yet again on the gleeful fun that is Ask Domesticat, but I have a small little feature change to Quarto (and, therefore, the entire site) that I think some of you might want to take a look at.

Yep, registered users can now set all posts and comments on 'cat.net to the timezone of their choice. Just because I'm in Central time (GMT-6) doesn't mean you have to be. However, you won't see any changes if you don't set up a time zone; Central time will be the default choice for the lazy amongst you. In other words, status quo.

Funny—it doesn't look much different around here, but oh, at last, at last I get to say the words I've been dying and itching and wishing and dreaming of saying for a long, long time now:

Welcome to domesticat.net, powered by Quarto.There is a lot left to be done. A few of my entries were categorized through the usernames I originally used to post them, but those were less than a hundred of the ~640 posts I have archived on this site.

Trust me, it's funnier if you know what's been going on the past 24 hours or so.  The short version is that those of you wanting to jump the gun and position yourself for the goofy madness that is the Quarto unveiling can go to the registration page and sign up to be a registered commenter.

("But, Mom, do we have to?")

Of course not.  But it means that I'll be a sweetie, and run the nifty little script that marks your old comments as belonging to your new account, thus tying your personal info provided in the comment to the contact information in your account.  (In other words, change your contact info in your account, and all your old comments reflect the change.  Databases kick ass.)

Tonight I understood that things were Really Going To Work. As in, were Really Going To Work, in the cosmic, hit-over-the-head fashion that's completely impossible to ignore in the way that things like the success of internal-combustion engines are hard to ignore. True, everyone but me has known that things were Really Going To Work for a good deal of time (and have been waiting on me to see the obvious) but about an hour ago, I finally got it:

me: my. god. this. is. really. going. to. work.
Gareth: well of course
me: yeah, but…um, I coded the vast majority of it.
me: the two are generally incompatible
Gareth: psh
Gareth: tell that to php