Makiko Itoh : Not a nameless cat.

I'll finally be changing this site over to Drupal 6 shortly. Since it will be a rehearsal for moving the big sites over too, it should be interesting.

I think I will be keeping the current design - interesting how I haven't tired of it yet.

Update: The upgrade went well except all the Markdown formatting disappeared. That is also now corrected.

As the owner of a couple of mildly popular blogs (not this one,obviously) I, like many others, get my daily dose of PR email. I usually skim and dump them. Most of them are barely worth that amount of attention. (I don't even count the lame ones sent to the address where the domains are registered, asking for a 'cooperation' (translation: link exchange) with a "top rated web site with a Google PR of 0". Huh?)

I am far from being a horse kind of person. Horses generally scare me when I meet them in, uh, person. But I do think they are the most beautiful creatures on this earth, especially when in full stride.

the filly Eight Belles having to be put down after the Kentucky Derby, a tragic event indeed. By a rather eerie coincidence, the trainer of the most famous filly racer ever, Ruffian, died on Friday.

The fun thing about house hunting in Europe is that you run into all kinds of fascinating old places. You don't really get that in the U.S., or in Japan either, where people tend to knock down houses and rebuild (the land is the important thing).

This place for instance, is a 12th century stone built manor house that used to be owned by the Knights Templar. It is near a village called Villedieu (literally, Godtown).

I am house hunting.

Fairly sure I wouldn't want to live here though.

I truly wonder what was going on through this person's mind when they uploaded not one, but three slanty-pics like this.

Amen.

I've had the pleasure of being informed that my pages do not validate a number of times. I suppose it's because way back then I used to write about web design and stuff, and my old articles are still floating out there on the interwebs. Guess one reason why I've basically stopped writing about such things.

(I know exactly where and why my pages don't validate. Go away.)

A part of my post here about Drupal is quoted on a BlogHer post about the lack of women at the latest DrupalCon in Boston. It's all because I left a comment on Shelley Powers' site. Rats, I need to hide more.

I recently got an email from yet another site that wants to rank blogs. Yawn.

Their pitch went something like this: "We rank blogs according to how many incoming links they have from other blogs. We do not count sidebar links."

In other words, yet another thing that attempts to rank how much inner-blog circle crosslinking/circle jerking there is.

This kind of thing totally ignores the fact that a blog is not necessarily a platform for inner-blog conversation anymore, if it was at all in the first place. Blog programs nowadays are used for easy publishing and updating of any kind of web site.

I occasionally like to post polls on my food blogs. Polls are an easy way for the comment-shy reader to express their opinion. So, I recently put up a poll on Just Bento, What kind of recipes would you like to see more of on Just Bento? , just to get a general idea of what people wanted. Now, the way Drupal polls work is that they restrict votes to one per IP address. Simple enough.