Have you noticed that I have shiny new tags? And that the categories and archives are in drop-down boxes? Wordpress have finally got their fingers out and added this functionality. And to think I changed to them partly because Blogger was behind the times!

There’s a tool which allows you to convert your categories to tags, if you so desire. If only I hadn’t deleted all the millions of categories I had a while back. Now I’m going to have to go through all the posts and tag them individually.

Still, it’s another thing I can use to procrastinate

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I tend to use LaTeX these days for word-processing (or type-setting documents, as the Latex [do you really think I can be bothered typing it out all fancy-like every time?] people would have it) because Word always annoys me and I can’t be doing with working out how to do IPA in it, but I’ve now got my hands on Word 2007, which seems happy to do blog posts for you. This may be better or worse than using the WordPress interface, but you never know.

But now, it’s ever-so-late, so I think, as Zebedee says, it’s time for bed.

Oh, I’ve just had a thought: Word is infamous for producing bloated and non-standard HTML; is it going to do the same with XHTML in my blog?

Of course, being so annoyingly pedantic and having to obey the rules and whatnot, my site is XHTML strict, which is a problem when you’ve went and done external links on your blog, which was originally XHTML Transitional, as target="_blank". Now none of the pages with such links on pass the validator, so I’ll have to change them all if I want it to be correct, which of course, I do. That’ll take forever, of course. If you happen to spot any of these, you could help me by telling me via my contact form (link in the main menu).

There are also some <div> tags which are not properly aligned. Ho hum.

And there’s a problem with the WordPress footer.

Update: the problems mentioned above are now fixed.

It looks to me as if I’ve pretty much fixed my blog now - woohoo! I wonder if it’ll transfer to the other blog easily. I’m not going to try now though, because I’ve got to do all the work I haven’t been doing because of doing this. Bad Caity!

I have to do a screenshot as well, which will have to wait until I find out how everyone else applies their theme to what looks like a specially set up blog.

Can you see how I’ve “done something” to my blog layout? Does it show?

I have always wanted my blog to match the rest of my site, so yesterday, in a fit of PhD procrastination, I started faffing about with it. It’s not looking quite right yet, is it?

And not only is the blog broken, but the rest of the site’s not looking quite right either.

Thank you for your lovely email - it’s nice to know that someone out there reads and appreciates my twitterings. What you said about your friends and my blog was lovely, and I’m pleased my blog makes you feel that way. As for how do I find the time? I don’t - I just put it off

As you can see, I also use the word nice when not referring to food. Ignore your teacher - that’s a crazy thing to say. I can’t decide whether it’s better or worse than telling you never to use the word!

You might be interested to learn that nice originally came from *ne Indo-European ‘not’ and *skei Indo-European ‘cut’, which entered Latin in the form scire ‘to know’, so the resulting Latin word is nescire ‘to be ignorant of’. An adjective was formed from this, nescius ‘ignorant’, which, as Latin evolved into Old French as nice ’silly’. It entered English as a loan word from the French with the meaning ‘foolish, shy’, which eventually changed to ‘modest’. Since then, it has had all sorts of different meanings: ‘delicate’, ‘considerate’, ‘pleasant’, ‘agreeable’ (Bauer and Trudgill, 1998).

I see nothing that should apply specifically to food in its etymology, unless it’s for meat that is too tough to cut, which probably means that the meat isn’t very nice anyway.

Bauer, Laurie and Peter Trudgill (eds) (1998) Language myths