Rrrrrr! Every time I look at this site, I see something else that needs to be fixed. I’m starting to get a bit paranoid about all the changes I’m making to the core code. I’m trying to comment everything, but jeeze…if I need to upgrade my copy of WordPress, I’m gonna have to do it on a separate subdomain to test and see how much of my stuff it broke. God.

Well, I’ve made a few fixes, at least. Now, when you read the various post comments, the author of each comment is shown using his or her current profile name (either the loginname or the nickname, whichever that user has chosen to have displayed). As the comment system in WordPress was not originally designed to require membership to function (that’s another hack I’ve implemented), it normally hard-codes the name, email and URI you type in for each comment and displays that. So if you, say, change your profile nickname or website address later, the change isn’t retroactive. All of your old comments show your old name and your old link, if any.

This blows, ladies and gentlemen, and it is also what I’m attempting to correct. Now that the comment author name is showing correctly, I need to get it to also pull the website URI from the user profile (it’s still using the hard-coded one right now). I also need to populate the form fields at the bottom based on the user profile, too. And the more I think about it, the more I think I should alter what gets stored in the cookie on the user’s system so that all of this shit can be culled without a million SQL queries. GAAAAH! If I’m going to change that much core code, I should really make the whole functionality a WordPress plugin instead, so it’s modular. I don’t know how to do that, unfortunately, but I guess I should learn. Hell, I’ve learned a lot just in the last week from implementing all the rest of the hacks on this site. Why stop now?

…Except that I’m going to take a break first, play some games, spend time with my wife, and stop obsessing over it quite so much. My perfectionist tendencies are really gnawing at me, telling me that I should not be stopping for an instant as long as some pithy detail is still out of place here on the site. But life’s too short for such things. I’ve just got to try to suppress those urges. Besides, I’ve got other work to do…I need to get our Thailand photos up on the Oddball Photo Gallery, change the oil in both the Mazda and the Trans Am, and optimally wash both cars (or at least one of them). I doubt all of the above is going to get done, which makes me think that I should take a day off next week sometime. Not like I’m planning to go anywhere for the rest of the year, although I would like to save a few days for the Christmas holiday season, even if I’ll be here at home. (A visit to Orlando might be apropos, although that’s when everybody and their mother goes there, so perhaps not.)

Okay, going now. I’ll post some more later. Still lots more to say.