y₀?

This site now runs on Wordpress. As I mentioned in my first post, Blogger was intended only as a step between nothing and a more full-featured solution. At the time that was MT; after the recent brouhaha over licensing I decided to look elsewhere to avoid any possible hassles. For whatever reason, Wordpress came up quite a bit, so I figured I’d give it a try. It seems to work quite well for what I do, and as it’s PHP-based, getting set up is simple (no file attribute tweaking, etc.).

I’ve also spent a little time reading about the development efforts behind it. The UI changes definitely are a good thing, though there are still a few places that need to be converted. Overall, the admin interface strikes me as very clean, although it’s rather difficult to get to certain settings without searching to find out for sure where a feature is located.

I’ve also submitted my first feature request. It’s a simple feature I’ve already hacked into this blog installation, but I’m reasonably sure my method isn’t good enough for the real code. I’ll leave it up to a real coder, and for now I’ll stick with my hack.

I decided to switch off of blogger.com…testing out FTP hosting on a 1and1 free hosting account (3-year free deal==excellent). (Edit: it works! It would have been nice if the Help docs had mentioned that a log out might be necessary for it to work in a more prominent place. It was in the troubleshooting section but not in the FTP setup section.)

While I’m at it, I should probably explain the title of this blog. Think back to your high school physics class. Remember how you learned all about these equations for motion:

• v=v₀+at
• v²=v₀²+2aΔx
• Δx=v₀t+1/2at²
• Δx=(v+v₀)t/2

Well, you’ll notice that v₀ is repeated pretty often…that’s the initial velocity of the object whose position, velocity, and acceleration are being tracked. The equations are easily verifiable using common sense, logic, and a little calculus if you desire. Anyways, the variable v₀ is pronounced as “vee not”. (I’ve never liked the “not” part so I pronounce it as “vee oh”.) Similarly, y₀ is pronounced “wye not”. “wye not” == “Why not?” It’s an interesting question, I suppose, and it’s suitably cryptic (thus a fitting blog title - yes, I’m cynical and I know it). The blog title is shown as y0 due to the inability to put HTML in blog titles (haven’t tested, will try after publishing this post - VERIFIED FIXED, although I had to manually plug the title into the page to get the subscript formatting).

Heh, it’s exactly 00:00 right now on my system clock…I should probably get some sleep. If only I could fall asleep that easily…

Heh. Will I actually use this or not? This is primarily in the interim between me having time to set up MT somewhere and use that in its fully-customizable glory. The problem with that is that it requires money for a good host. O where o where is a good (free/cheap) host?