toddh: god help me, I’m actually contemplating this 31 day challenge
Hawkins: just sign up already!
toddh: I’m doing it now. When I said ‘contemplating’ that was a bit of a stretch
Hawkins: even if you don’t do any of the steps, save the emails and at some point the mood may strike you to take action on a couple of ‘em.
toddh: Yeah, I’m going to actually attempt it. We’ll see how much I get through but I think it’s worthwhile and April is a good month because (he says naively) I don’t really have anything going on this month

Problogger is doing this whole thing where he’s giving people structured advice spaced out over 31 days. One 10-15 minute task a day about how to make your blog better. As evinced from the above conversation, I may not be going into this with the best attitude but I’m willing to give it a shot.

aside: If you want to know what a Kinesis is like put a bunch of keyboard keys in two cereal bowls in front of you and imagine typing with your hands in these bowls. They are amazingly comfortable to type on once you get used to it and once you do it will completely ruin you for any other keyboard. I use one too (minus the dvorak insanity) and I think that they’re what typing in heaven must be like.

For years we’ve laughed at him because all of this together makes his computer completely useless for anyone else to sit at and attempt to use. It’s kind of like a weird security measure.

Another fun bit of background is that John is the kind of guy that picks up some toy or game of skill (ie: juggling, yo-yos, poker) and 10 minutes after you’ve taught him how to use it, he’s beating you at it. His wife said it best when I commented on this phenomena shortly after we had met “Oh, now you get to play the ‘John’s good at everything’ game too”. He wins at everything

On with the story…He hipped me to this big conspiracy recently about his beloved dvorak keyboard layout. That’s a good article but it’s really long. I’ll summarize it thusly: Dvorak was a big fat liar and duped people in a big way with falsified evidence of how great his keyboard layout was. After reading this article John says that he’s thinking of switching back to Qwerty. Learning to touch type sucks. Un-learning and then re-learning how to touch type in a totally different way is madness. I’m sure he’s going to document the process more fully. I just tell you all of that to show you the following conversation in context.

Hawkins: I was going to say you pick a date and a Words Per Minute count and I’ll see if I can reach that goal by the time that date comes around.
Hawkins: With lunch on the line or something like that.
Hawkins: Lunch is always such a great thing to wager.
toddh: I wonder how fast I can type now? I haven’t tested since I got the Kinesis but that was before I was as good as I am now
Hawkins: Yeah, me neither.
Hawkins: http://www.typeonline.co.uk/typingspeed.php
Hawkins: let’s both do this.
toddh: k

…8 minutes pass as we both type furiously…

Hawkins: 64 words per minute with 4 mistakes. holy crap, that’s way faster than I would have expected…
toddh: 70wpm with 4 mistakes.
toddh: boom, I win!!
toddh: I -never- win!
toddh: Holy crap, is this how you feel -all the time- ?!
Hawkins: LOL!!!!
Hawkins: I’m retaking the test. lol
Hawkins: wow, is this how -you- feel all the time?
toddh: LOFL
Hawkins: you are going to print and frame this conversation, aren’t you?
toddh: Yup

Maybe I’m not framing it but I’m doing the next best thing and putting it on the Internet for all to behold. I played a game against John Hawkins and I won.

The idea was simple. Take a picture of whatever I was doing, from my new cameraphone, every day at the exact same time, and post it to a blog. This wasn’t an original idea but my original take was that I would do it all from the phone. Take the picture, write the post, post to the Internet, all from the handset. There was no software at the time to do what I wanted to do. Luckily I had a laptop, knew how to program PHP and had a couple hours to kill. Thus 606diaries.com was born.

The site looked like crap (most notably lacking a single image on the entire thing) but it had an efficient database design and did exactly what I wanted to. It was a fun diversion and I ended up liking two things about it way more than I thought I would. I loved to blog on a regular basis and I loved tinkering with the software.

Almost immediately after I started blogging WordPress 1.5 was released and I began to get pressure from my various blogging friends to make my blog a WordPress blog. There were other suggestions as well but give me a break. I didn’t like WordPress but the other options at the time were just putrid. You couldn’t post to WordPress at the time from email, anyway, and I didn’t really feel like porting my email posting code over to some new codebase. I also knew my email posting code was a filthy, dirty hack and I didn’t really want anyone besides myself to see it so writing a plug-in for WordPress was definitely out of the question. Over the years WordPress got steadily better but I secretly gloated at every new exploit and hack that showed up. My code might not have been perfect but since it had an installed base of 1 it was unlikely that anyone was going to systematically discover any exploits in it. My code worked, the site looked OK and any new functionality was a dirty, filthy hack away.

Then -he- changed everything.

My dear friend, John Hawkins, one of the people pressuring me to change, hosted WordCamp Las Vegas in January 2009. I went to be supportive and help out as necessary but I felt a little like an interloper, an outcast, unclean. For two days I sat and listened to talks about plug-ins and SEO and user experience and XMLRPC interfaces. The thought of having to replicate some of the fantastic functionality that already existed or was on its way for WordPress, frankly, unmanned me. There was no way I could compete with hundreds of contributors to WordPress around the globe. In my mind I had already started to plan the conversion. I hadn’t acted on it though and then he asks me for some help on a WordPress plug-in. Even though I’m not a user I’ve still helped him hack together a plug-in before but there was this moment in our chat…looking back here it was. The germ of an idea was obviously growing

toddh: I’ll also have to see what the state of the 606diaries-like functionality is. Maybe it’s all good now. Who knows
Hawkins: he he. that would be cool if you could move it over.

The nerve…

He totally slow played that.

What followed was a whole lot of conversation back and forth. Helpful advice here and there about what theme to use, what plug-ins to try. Next thing I knew I was spending hours porting over my existing design into the WordPress theme I had picked. It was frustrating to say the least. See for yourself

Hawkins: uh, those images are a bit tall.
toddh: I will stab you, don’t think I won’t
Hawkins: oh, on my screen they were showing up more than 1 full screen height tall.
Hawkins: the “I will stab you” comment is classic.
Hawkins: mainly cause I don’t think you are kidding…. at all.

And he’s right. Sometimes the entire conversion process just seemed like too much work. It didn’t matter though. Much like I loved the original hacking of my custom software I was solving new and interesting problems now with WordPress.

Hawkins: there will, eventually, be a point where you love me for making you switch to WP, right? right? hello?
toddh: …we’ll see
Hawkins: Just think of how much I have helped you learn…
toddh: forced to learn
Hawkins: helped/forced, tomato/ketchup
toddh: At times it was like being chained to a desk with my eyelids taped open, reading W3C documentation
toddh: Oh, that’s a shitty analogy because except for the tape THAT WAS ACTUALLY HAPPENING
Hawkins: Oh ya know what, I have a suggestion for ya…
Hawkins: don’t upgrade. you should leave 606 the way it is.
toddh: I hate you
Hawkins: Or, better yet… have you ever tried Movable Type?
Hawkins: Drupal?
toddh: I think Warren Ellis said it the best in a recent twitter message “get out of my fucking office or i will stab you right in the fucking gizzard STABBY STABBY FUCKING STABBY”
toddh: you can modify those words as necessary to fit our current situation
Hawkins: I can’t tell you the level of enjoyment I have in our little conversations here.

Days of hacking later, it’s finally coming together

Hawkins: ok, here’s my suggestion… remove the >> from the recent comments on the right. Just leave a trailing … and have it link to the comments on the full post page. It’ll save you the trouble of the images breaking crap. And, it’s how I would expect it to work as a user, anyway.
toddh: LOL, easier said than done. I can’t find the damn >>
Hawkins: oh, and you still need to fix the color of the footer. Oh, and one other thing I was thinking…
toddh: Need I remind you “STABBY STABBY FUCKING STABBY”
Hawkins: have you tried searching for “raquo”
toddh: That I have not
Hawkins: the urge to stab should subside if I’m right.
Hawkins: right?
toddh: jesus christ it’s in this plugin 89 times
toddh: that’s not an exaggeration
Hawkins: you can NOT blame that on me!
toddh: and yes, I have less of an urge to stab you because now I know how to delete it
Hawkins: FTW!

The rest is history. My beloved 606 is converted and we embark upon a brave new world. Throughout the entire process I was also imagining this site as a secondary blog. Less a structured, single-purpose blog and more of a regular multi-purpose with longer posts, product/book/movie/restaurant reviews, rants and general bloggery. I knew the first post I was going to write too. Unfortunately I had made the mistake of mentioning this to Hawkins. Not content to merely drag me kicking and screaming into the WordPress world, with constant listening to threats of stabbing by me, he continues to poke the bear.

Hawkins: I am still waiting for your post on t0dd.net about the process of switching to WP on 606 and all the threats to stab me.
toddh: I know me too. Yet every day I wake up and it hasn’t magically written itself :-/
Hawkins: it too must be an asshole then.
toddh: that it is

If he shows up stabbed and I’m implicated. This blog post is my record to the world. It will be totally justified and no jury would convict me with this as defenses exhibit A. Right?