Dear Diary,

Posted on September 30, 2010 by Raiu

For as long as I’ve been able to contemplate the future I have been nervous about it.  No one can ever understand the anxiety that the simple question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” triggered in my little mind.  I have always believed that I could be anything. And the scope of potential for everything overwhelms me.  I have a passion for countless things and a peculiar inability to focus on just one passion.  Suffice it to say, lacking the ability to focus has seen me closing up my 31st year without the vaguest sense of personal direction.

Whenever I am in college, something that comes and goes, I have a very difficult time choosing an academic path or major.  With each class I take, a new passion for the subject matter bloom within me and I find myself daydreaming intensely about a future in which I follow that  subject.  In my mind I have been an Art Historian, Astronomer, Psychologist, Writer, Physicist, Cultural Anthropologist, etc.  If I have taken the elective then I have wanted to pursue it as a career.  Unfortunately, a good hour long special on television can also inspire me.

I don’t think I’m flighty, though I also play that part with great skill.  I just think I’m greedy.  I’m far too concerned with all the things I’ll miss out on if I ever find the focus to be able to specialize in just one thing.  Life is far too short as it is.  And having a narrow view through a self chosen vocation or life path is something that I fear.

If I could have one wish it would be to be immortal.  I don’t have codependency issues.  I prefer solitude.  So the dilemma over outliving loved ones and ultimately being alone does not bother me.  If I had all the time in the world, then  my mortality driven anxieties about missing out on the richness of life would not exist.  I could then choose to become an Astronomer, followed by a Sculptural Jeweler or a Botanist.  But I’m not immortal.  I have to come to terms with my very rational fears of a life denying countless potentials in favor of one.  Otherwise for the remainder of my life I will continue to deny myself all of them.

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taking advantage of the WP multisite function

Posted on September 27, 2010 by Raiu

for over a year now I have been running multiple wordpress installations across my domain.  For each subdomain you see at the very top of every page there was a separate WP install which required separate logins and a whole lot of neglect on my part.  So when the newer versions of WP boasted a multi-site capability I decided that I should probably take advantage of it.

With the new network settings and my fancy “super admin” menu I can navigate to each blog’s dashboard without having to login to each one.    The only way they could possibly make this easier is if there was an option from the new post page to choose which blog to post to.

I had toyed with just operating one blog and parsing content to different pages based on category.  This would mean that I would post an entry here and label it under the category of “journal.”  Then the Journal Page would be set up only to pull posts under the category of Journal.  But pages show up as subfolders and I prefer subdomains.  So the link would look like this: displacedworld.com/txt instead of txt.displacedworld.com

There was a plugin I tried that was supposed to create subdomains from pages or categories, but I couldn’t get it to work.  I also toyed around with copying the WP index.php page to my existing subdomains and modifying them to pull the content that I wanted.  This second option worked superficially.  But while I could get all my journal posts to show up on txt.displacedworld.com, if you were to click and entry the permalink would be displacedworld.com/txt/blog-entry.php.

I really didn’t want to go back to multiple installations of WP, so I started getting used to the less than ideal permalink situation with my blog posts.  But then I wanted each subdomain/category to have it’s own header information.  So I started creating additional template pages to be used on my subdomain pages.  But again, when the link was clicked to go to a single entry, all blog formatting and styles would revert to the default install template..  And it was at this point that I said, “Fuck it.”

So, here we are again.  Fresh install of WP.  I could import all my old posts.  I religiously backup my blog’s contents.  But I’m honestly not seeing the appeal of that.

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