Hello World!

I've been thinking of doing something like this for a long time. It would be much easier to maintain, but it would be a huge task to move 20 years of content over to the new platform.

After a few hours of hacking, I can't believe I got WordPress to largely replicate the look and feel of the old hand-made site. I always thought the old site was beautiful, and I didn't want to convert it to some blocky ugly generic WordPress-looking thing. I can spot a WordPress site a mile away - they all look basically the same - like the designer's finest tool was a shovel.

This doesn't look like WordPress at all. It has all the visual style and pop of the original. And I did it while maintaining the basic flexibility of the WordPress theme I have been developing. I'm giving myself one of these:

The next step will be seeing if I can organize everything in the new structure. The old clickable image maps are going to be the first victim. Those were easy to do twenty years ago with FrontPage, but nowadays there really is no good way to maintain them. GIMP will do it, but it is clumsy and too much work.


Sparrow
Red-Eyed Vireo

It is not at all uncommon for small songbirds to be blown out to sea in a strong west wind ( or a north wind, for Long Island. ) Unable to make their way back to land, these tiny fliers eventually tire and drop into the water, or get picked off by seagulls. In desperation, they will alight on anything solid to rest. An anchored dive boat makes an easy target and may collect several hitchhikers over the course of a day. This little guy was so exhausted that he even perched on a finger for photographs. Generally, though, you should just leave them alone and not frighten them further, and they will fly away on their own once the boat gets back to land.