When it comes to showing off your interior design prowess, there’s not much point to wallpapering your storage closet, as neither you nor your guests have much need or motivation to go check it out. Still, if you’ve been meaning to tidy up that closet and want to practice your wallpaper technique, it’s not the biggest possible waste of time, either.

I’m not literally decorating my storage closet. This is one of those metaphor things, where the closet is this blog. It has been so long since I added anything new that even if a few close friends and family used to check for new posts, they’ve probably given up by now. No one has been clamoring for a TFM redesign, and I’d undoubtedly be better off adding new content than giving the site a makeover. But…I was pretty overdue for updating to the latest release of the blog software (Wordpress), and when I finally got around to that, my old theme didn’t really take advantage of some cool new features, so I had to pick a new one. As of this writing, it’s little more than the default look of the template I chose, but I hope to customize the colors and other little things to give it a distinctive TFM look. Also as of this writing, I’ve got lots of other higher priorities on my to-do list, so we’ll see how that goes. Maybe I’ll even start publishing fresh content again. That would be nice, eh?

Since I ended another long period of blog hibernation and began posting regularly again, I needed to attend to some overdue blogkeeping duties like making sure my software was up to date. In the course of routine maintenance, I discovered a plug-in called [Markdown][1] that I wanted to start using, which would simplify the process of writing my posts. Without going into the techie details, what this plug-in does is simplify what it takes to pull off formatting like italics, bold, and making links, compared to doing those same things with HTML tags. Basically, it lets you just write instead of having to write and code for formatting at the same time. |inline

I first created “The Finite Monkey” when I wanted a place to post stories and pictures about my 2002 World Cruise aboard the Crystal Symphony. A blog would have been a great format for that, but blog hadn’t yet become a household word, and I wasn’t aware of them yet, so my original site was old-fashioned HTML, and a pain to maintain. When I discovered blogging, I knew it was the direction I wanted to go, so I evaluated the (free) alternatives available at the time, and decided Movable Type offered the best combination of power, customizability, and ease of use. Movable Type is still a great blogging tool, but the blogging landscape has changed, and when I recently took a fresh look at the alternatives available, Wordpress emerged as the new favorite. |inline