Mom & Me Four Archive

...meant to be deleted. I want to keep it as a record of the successes and problems I'm having with Blogger Beta.
    Initially I had such surprising success with transferring the =>Moving =>Mom and the Movies, Mom & Me journals that I decided to transfer The Dailies.
    Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp Minor, "Moonlight", Opus 27, 3rd Movement, Artur Rubenstein playing...I'm leaning against my living room picture window in Seattle, listening to Barenboim play it while I follow along in the sheet music (illuminated by the angle of the lone back light at the rear of the apartment complex, since I'm in the dark in my living room) during certain passages to increase the thrill (I've got my CD player set to repeat), then looking out my window to watch the Christmas boat parade traversing "my" section of Lake Washington...
    That's when I noticed problems. I encountered the first when I attempted to access my archives at The Dailies. I got "Not on this server" error messages. So, thinking Blogger Beta must have dumped them during the transition, I ftped and realized, Yes, they are, goddamnit! I started prowling through Blogger's settings and realized that during the transfer Blogger deletes the archive path. I filled that in, sighed and assumed everything was fine. I ran a few test posts on all three journals. No problem, except the post publishing process seemed to be a little slow; it is almost instantaneous on the old version. I tested my domain ISP server, tested my cable connection, everything seemed fine, so, I figured, okay, well, it's just going to be slow. Then, I modified a template on the shortest of the journals and realized that the entire publication process for ftped blogs is quite slow. I scavenged Blogger and some blogger hack blogs for help or mention about this. Not much, not anything helpful, anyway. Considering their suggestion that Firefox browser was best to use, I switched from my Mac to my PC, which gets excellent response with Firefox. If anything, the publishing process was slower, because I couldn't stop it mid-stream, as I could on my Mac, and be sure that I wasn't publishing corrupted files.
    Also, over at that site I use a personalized post template for the stats. It initially confused Blogger Beta, which, for a couple of publishings, deleted the necessary break tags. It stopped that, though. I'm not sure why, and I'm not going to try to figure it out unless it happens again.
    "Upstairs by a Chinese Lamp" by Laura Nyro, off the "Christmas and the Beads of Sweat" album is playing. Whoa. They've got the wrong album listed. I'm at the barre in my bedroom-behind-the-garage on Guam, practicing leg stretches, bourees, plies, I'm thinking from inside my body, taking direction from the music, so loud that, my eyes closed, it has become my room...
    Oh well, I decided, I can't go back, so I'll make the best of it and explore. I am pleased to report that Blogger Beta left my "old style" templates unharmed. It even works when I modify the templates and republish them. Thank the gods for that. This was the main reason I hadn't switched. Although I've been familiarizing myself with the skin, variable and widget concepts and they aren't that difficult to understand, I'd been putting off designing a template using the new rules; and I can't stand their standard templates (one of which I use at The Dailies). They haven't changed them, just modified the most innocuous and deleted several. There aren't yet any promising hacked templates out there that I would consider trying, either. And, anyway, I like my own.
    The main reason I switched was that I discovered that even those people who ftp their journals to remote servers, thus, will not be able to use the widget templating concept (thank the gods for that, too, frankly), will be able to attach labels. I was delirious! This, I decided, would be the answer to my continued messy attempts to create a dynamic Table of Contents. Of course, none of the literature bothered to mention that the generating of a Label Index is dependent on widget technology and would be unavailable to those who couldn't avail themselves of this. So, I spent yesterday figuring out how to generate a Label Index on my templates, experimenting over at Movies, Mom & Me. It's a manual solution that involves noticing the naming of the label pages on the server and building the index within the template, but it's pretty easy. Once a label's in the index, it's there for the duration; and, since it's dynamic-page centered, each category will continually update as more posts are labeled. I suppose there's a piece of dynamic code I could place to do this. I just haven't gotten that far, yet. I've been having to go back, break apart my multiple movie posts and republish each movie as a separate post in order to label it, but the only part of the exercise that's laborious is waiting for each post to publish. Otherwise, the process is progressing nicely. Click over there and take a peak. I posted a "new" movie, The Man Who Would Be King, today, of which I've been wanting a copy for years; the first one up when you hit the site. Try out the labels on it, then check out the Labels Index to the left below the archives...which reminds me...
    Dr John, "It's Such a Night", off the "Essentials" collection...I'm driving home from a friend's in North Scottsdale who just listened to me until I'd exhausted my anxiety about tough times managing my ill mother and her affairs, he pierced my ears for the 13th and 14th times, I've got the windows open, I'm feeling cool, sauntering, jaunty, I can do this, I'm thinking, with style, I can do this with my ears gleaming and my hips sashaying, I can do this...
    ...that's another thing. When an ftped blog is transferred, the archives are screwed up. The weekly archive, for instance, which used to be labeled "1/23/05 - 1/29/05" is now "1/23/05 - 1/30/05" and contains posts for 1/30/05 - 2/5/05. Go figure. There is a piece of dynamic code specific to archives that was inserted into my templates during the transfer, I notice. I guess I'll have to figure out how to fool around with that code. Bizarre. And, I suppose, notify Blogger Beta, as well.
    So, needless to say, it's going to be awhile before I transfer this journal over; not until I absolutely have to. I can just guess how long it would take to publish these posts. I shudder at the template publishing possibilities. At the moment, as well, my template here is only half published because Blogger's regular service is screwing up, which continues to be an "unresolved issue" and will, hopefully, be solved Monday during a planned outtage.
    Finally, I discovered that it's very easy to accidentally publish corrupted files on this version. I did it by accidentally dating a post "2015" rather than "2005". It was just luck that I noticed this, yet again ftping the server to see what was going on, when I was trying to publish a post and repeatedly received an "Error: Please type letters as they appear in image" message, but there was no image of letters and no field in which to type the image-ined letters.
    Mmmm...I'm listening to "Living it Up" by Ricki Lee Jones off the "Pirates" album...I'm driving my yellow Super Beetle through an underpass tunnel in Sacramento, CA, headed out of town, north for Redding to look at a dead cow (I was an insurance adjuster there, among other jobs). I'm unconcerned about that, though; the humidity, the rain, the sleek, shimmery tunnel, the tape in my cassette player...I'm in a very good mood, I'm driving at a speed that's synchronized to my metabolism...ahhh...and I'm meeting Gary "for lunch" up there...I'm cruising, literally and figuratively, today, dead cow and all...
    Why am I talking about all this technical journaling stuff here, with no mention of my mother? What does this have to do with taking care of my mother? I'll write about that tomorrow. In the meantime, Arlo Guthrie's "City of New Orleans" is rocking me like a Morpheus made of melody...time for sleeping, time for dreaming...
    Later.