Being Amber Rhea

Note, I’ll be messing with my theme today, so you might notice some funkiness on the site. I tried to use a plug-in called Preview Theme, where you can specify a theme in the query string and it’ll show it to you if you’re logged in at a certain user level, but it didn’t work. So I’ll just mess with the live site. Fortunately I didn’t have to change any HTML, only CSS (because I rule).

Other than that, my day looks like this:

(Jenny sent me this e-card.)

Friday evening, I talked with a guy (not using his name at the moment in case he doesn’t want me to) who has coordinated lots of events and is very well-connected in terms of knowing people who would be interested in Sex 2.0. I told him some of the stuff I was stressing out about: how to get sponsors, how to make it look like an attractive venture without compromising what we want to do, what to do if we can’t get enough sponsors to cover the overhead costs, my worries that other people involved weren’t doing their fair share, and so on and so forth.

His advice?

Charge $10 admission rather than relying on sponsors to cover costs. That way, we’re not beholden to sponsors’ wants or squicks, and we can do it our way. As for the $10 admission, he said, if people say they’re not going to come because we’re charging $10, then they weren’t going to come in the first place, because that’s not a valid excuse. And if they really are pissed about such a paltry price, then we don’t want them there anyway. Also, people tend to be more invested in something if they have to pay, even if the price is low. For one thing that’ll make our headcount much more accurate.

Additionally, we can have vendor tables at a low cost. I think this is great, because one of the things I’ve wanted to do with this ever since I came up w/ the Sex 2.0 idea is showcase local sex-positive businesses and organizations. This way, that goal will be accomplished, and I won’t have to beg them for money. I know many of the places I have in mind don’t have the kind of money that we would need from sponsors, but I don’t want them to be excluded from the event, which is what would’ve happened with the old model.

All in all, I feel about 100 times better about Sex 2.0 after that conversation, and I have a renewed feeling of inspiration and vigor! I also decided to ditch the wiki and make a WordPress-based web site instead. There will be a blog component, of course. It’s pretty much complete: http://sex20con.com. The registration page works and everything. Did I mention, Eventbrite rocks my socks?

So, once again, mark your calendars for April 12, 2008. Sex 2.0 is going to be an amazing event!!

[Cross-posted on the Sex 2.0 blog]

What the hell? Why did my July 8th Twitter updates get posted about 30 times??

I deleted all the excess, but good god, was that disconcerting. Sorry about that, y’all. If it happens again I’m just going to have to disable Twitter Tools.

If you want to disable WordPress smilies, the relevant function is in wp-includes/formatting.php. It’s called convert_smilies.

The smilies were annoying me. So I just commented out most of the function.

If you want to do this, just leave $output = $text; and return $output; and you’ll be fine.

Update: Never mind, the option is in the WP admin! Somehow I had managed to miss it, but Shelby pointed me in the right direction.

If things look weird around here during the next few days, particularly in the comments section, don’t worry your pretty little heads about it. I noticed that when comment threads get past a certain length, things start to look fucked up - specifically, the page doesn’t expand as far as it’s supposed to, and you end up with text on top of text. This baffles me because I’m usually basically the same code as I did on the old blog; but nevertheless, there is fucked-upedness, and I will address it as I get time.

One day, I imagine I’ll set up a dev server for this kind of UI testing - but that day is not today. So just deal until all is well.

Today’s the day, folks… this five-year anniversary of this blog’s inception. According to About.com, traditional gift ideas for a fifth anniversary include airline tickets or a cruise. I’m just saying.

When I started this blog on April 17, 2002, I was 22 years old, married, living in Athens, and about to finish my undergraduate degree. I was using a 350mhz Sawtooth G4 tower, which was a really nice computer and which I still miss sometimes. There was no such thing as podcasting. There were very few blogging tools available, and the ones that were available were pretty clunky, so a homegrown system was obviously the way to go. Plus it gave me an opportunity to practice (and improve, over the years) my PHP skills.

But now, five years later, in commemoration of this milestone, guess what I’m doing? I’m moving to WordPress. I never thought the day would come! And I bet you didn’t either, readers. I have to say, when I was messing with WordPress last week, getting the new site ready, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the WordPress back-end code looks a lot like my code. Only difference is WordPress has more of it consolidated into functions (which makes sense).

I’m switching to WordPress not because it’s the hip thing to do, but because I was happy to continue using my homegrown system until I began to feel limited by it. And, in the past few months, that’s what has happened. There are capabilities I’d like to have - for example, tagging - that I don’t have with my system. Sure, I could write that stuff into my system, but why reinvent the wheel? I don’t have time, and I’m past the point of trying to “prove” my PHP/MySQL programming capabilities to myself.

So, without further ado - the new site is (drumroll) beingamberrhea.com. Please update your links!

You can grab the new RSS feed at http://www.beingamberrhea.com/feed. Alternately, if you don’t want to get my daily del.icio.us and Twitter updates, you can subscribe to http://www.beingamberrhea.com/category/blog/feed for actual blog posts only.

The old site will remain for posterity and reference, but after a few days I will disable comments.

I look forward to seeing y’all around here!

I really did it… I installed WordPress.