Life in POD-land
Yes, I’m still alive. No, I haven’t succumbed to a recurrence of tonsillitis. No, I haven’t fallen off the face of the Earth. And no, I haven’t joined the TSA. (I don’t meet their standards, since I have a basic amount of common sense. I don’t drag my knuckles or wear jackboots either, but I digress…)
I’ve been working on the Picture of the Day pretty much non-stop since February. I installed WordPress as a content management system and then taught myself PHP and WordPress theme development. It was more tedious than difficult, since I’ve been programming off and on for 25+ years.
My goal was to design a custom theme that looked like the old POD, but with lots of new stuff (comments, ratings, tags, etc.). Then I started importing the old archives. That turned out a to be a huge job, so I recruited a team of volunteers to help. Once we imported a sufficient number of pictures from 2007, 2008, and 2009, I decided to go live with the new interface on March 23. That was the Trillion-dollar post.