Planned: 8mi @ 8:00
Actual: 8.68mi @ 7:57
Average Heart Rate: 155bpm

This would have a been a pretty average run, say, four months ago. Nothing spectacular. Just a little endurance training. But it’s a whole other ball of wax (what does that even mean?) when it’s the longest run you’ve done in recent memory.

I’d like to say that the pace was the result of my willful effort, but it had more to do with the pain in my legs. And the cramp I got three quarters in.

In other news, I’ve begun work on a new site design. I just realized that I really don’t like my current one. The design itself is nearly finished. The code, however, has not even started. And that’s where the fun begins.

I received an email this morning telling me I had a comment. I’m at work, so IE gets fired up (Firefox won’t run for some reason) and there’s the entry with the comment…all centered. Wait. Centered? Correctly?

Yeah! I did some fiddling earlier in the week but I thought I’d changed everything back because it broke the site in FF and Safari (which, frankly, are more important to me than IE). At this point I have absolutely no idea what I did to fix the problem. But it seems to be working. Now I’m nervous that it doesn’t look good in the browsers that I care about. Anybody see any problems?

Anyway, whoopee. I’m sure y’all are just glowing inside about this. And I say glow on. Glow on.

I just upgraded my Wordpress install to 2.3.1. It looks okay on my end, but let me know if something’s off on yours. I realize that it’s still clinging to the right hand side of the screen on IE but, seriously, I am out of ideas.

Planned: 5mi @ 7:45 Actual: 5mi @ 737 Average Heart Rate: 147bpm

This was an easy week. I thought I’d skipped a run on Friday but it turns out, I didn’t have one. Nice.

As for the site, there are a few issues. First, IE breaks the centering and I don’t know why. Yet. Also, when I imported all my Blogger entries, the graphs weren’t pulled over. Instead of updating each post, I’ve decided to include the “Last 5 Runs” widget. If you really want to see the graph, it’ll be in the sidebar — even though including it breaks my precious XHTML Validation. There is a huge potential for broken stuff. I’ve fixed all the obvious issues, but there will probably be more to deal with. Bear with me.

I have spent the last two weeks banging my head against the wall trying to understand how Wordpress and these things called “modern websites” work. I did my share of simple design work back in 1998 when 56K modems were cutting edge and a site that didn’t have blue links and an annoying, tiled background was considered “designed”.

Today we have XHTML, CSS, PHP, Perl, Ajax, Javascript (that can do more than create a rollover)…the list is endless. I understand less than none of it. Which is why I decided to build a custom theme in a blogging software I’ve never even seen before. Because I’m smart.

You’re looking at that custom theme. And let me tell you, it was not an easy road to get here. One of the casualties of the journey was my sense of quality. “That looks fine,” has become my motto. I call it out from the tops of high mountains. Even if it’s not true.

Long story moderately-sized, you may stumble upon something that either broke or never worked in the first place. It’s bound to happen. Please let me know and I will spend another week researching what the heck you’re talking about and possibly look into doing something about it at a later date when I again care.

Let’s face it, it may be a while.