So for the past few months, I've been wanting to roll out some great new features on the website. I've had all these fascinating ideas and plans to really make WeHeartZihua work for the community and become a relevant, exciting (cyber)place to be. But alas, I was hung up by one huge major problem: I couldn't get any of the images in the site to show up in Firefox, my preferred browser. I was convinced that there was some bug, either in the forum install or in my programming for the directory that was causing this glitch. And I was certain that it was perpetuating itself in everyone else's browser (even though Bev kept insisting it was fine in her Firefox). So I've been researching the problem, reinstalling different parts of the site, rewriting every stylesheet, and nothing has worked. Imagine my excitement - and complete embarrassment - when I realized (by sheer accident) that I had set my own personal Firefox preferences to "block all images from www.weheartzihua.com"... How did I do this? Who knows.
Now that I've finally solved this problem (that literally haunted my dreams!), I have to decide what to do next! For a while, my first plan was to change the way our directory entries were archived so that they each were housed on an individual page rather than on their respective primary category page. This will empower us to include photographers, further information, link within different entries, and (down the road) add commenting capabilities. However, now that I can actually see our website in its entirety, there are a few other things I want to change stylistically. And I am completely psyched and geeked up for upgrading the entire website to the latest version of Movable Type (now in Beta). I've long planned on training Bev (who is extremely smart but not as tech-geeky as me) to use the interface we have to upload new content but have never gotten around to it. With Movable Type completely overhauling its system and interface, I've decided to wait so I don't have to teach her twice. As soon as all of the plugins that we use to make MT work for our website are upgraded to the new version, we'll be upgrading... So much geek fun, I think my head might explode! Of course, considering just how stupid silly I feel right now after my blocked image debacle, perhaps I should stick to just cutting and pasting for a few days....
