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.


Environmental organizations are both good and bad. State and federal governments have large departments that oversee environmental issues such as water and air pollution. These agencies have staffs of scientists and experienced technical personnel to plan and implement environmental protection programs and monitor environmental quality, and they generally manage to get the job done on their own.

While it is good that private citizens take an interest in such matters as well, private environmental groups often do as much harm as good. What they may lack in technical and scientific proficiency, they often make up for with media savvy. A phone call to Eye Witness News and the mere utterance of any number of keywords ( such as simply POLLUTION ! ) will automatically get their opinions on the air and in print, whether they are right or wrong.