I need to redo my main page. It doesn't match the rest of the site. I knocked together this version, but I'm not really happy with it. Any suggestions?

I was thinking yesterday, that an auto-linking plugin would be useful for WP, and it seemed that [Joel Bennett]'s acronym plugin (that tells you what things like WP and IRC and TBWITWW are) could be adapted to do what I wanted. As it turns out Joel is also on the #wordpress IRC channel as Jaykul. Of course at first I didn't realize that Jaykul is Joel. Let's see what happens...
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Time: 5:06pm CDT June 27, 2004 edited for brevity <morydd> Hmmm... I wonder if I can combine the acronym plugin and the linkifier plugin, and make something that auto-replaces things like [my brother] with links. <jaykul> yeah <jaykul> why not <morydd> hmmm... looks hard. <morydd> mostly because I don't know crap for PHP <jaykul> lol <jaykul> you should be able to modify the acronym plugin directly. <morydd> yeah, but I like the idea from the linkifier of only grabing stuff you mark. <morydd> so that a quote from someone else about thier brother won't link to my brother's page. Here I attempt to do this myself. <morydd> hmmm. <morydd> that didn't work. <morydd> duh... if you change a variable name on place, you should change it everywhere. <jaykul> Morydd: http://www.huddledmasses.org/wp-content/plugins/source.php?file=autolinker.php <jaykul> *poof* <morydd> guess "somebody" is you. :) <jaykul> yeah <jaykul> well, acronym is mine, and it seems like this should be the simplest way ... <jaykul> Morydd: here: http://www.huddledmasses.org/2004/06/27/autolinker-by-request-for-wordpress/ <jaykul> I put the squarebrackets regex in for you ;-) Time: 6:25pm CDT June 27, 2004

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I think that less than an hour and a half from suggestion to implementation of an idea is pretty darn good. This is made possible by a couple of things... Open Source Software and a very active and tight community. Because the software is open source, the users not only can make adjustments, but are encouraged to. Because of the closeness of the community around WP, getting help with ideas is amazingly easy. This benefits WordPress, because rather than a small team of developers trying to prioritze between functions and features, you have many people who build on the code, and the developers can focus on making the core product better and then incorporating the best features that others contribute, thereby helping the product become better, faster. But it also benefits everyone who works on WP because the users can get experience building functions and the like, and honing their programming abilities, as well as making the product work the way they want. The response to "I wish it did this..." is not "wait and see" it's "make it happen!"
Thanks [Joel Bennett] and thanks [WordPress]!

TBWITWW and I were wondering around this afternoon and stumbled across a Kodak Six-20 camera that looks like this. And we bought it. It's pretty sweet.

Yesterday TBWITWW and I went to the Taste of Chicago. It was a good time. Kind of like a picnic with a couple dozen thousand of your closest friends. At The Taste, we sampled a variety of food, most of which was excellent. Here's the rundown.

• O'Brien's Restaurant & Bar
• Celtic Corn on the Cob A Taste staple. Roasted corn on the cob, doused in butter, and with their special seasoning blend. Yum! Very Good

• Penang Malaysian Cuisne
• Roti Canai Indian style pancake with curry chicken and potato dipping sauce. This was just okay. The flavor was good but the chicken walked through with stilts on. The serving size was quite small for being 8 tickets ($4)
• Coconut Pudding A light, refreshing pudding with a hint of coconut flavor. If was hotter out it would have been too sweet, but the pudding (which had a texture more like jello) was very good, and a generous portion.

• Bella Luna Cafe
• Beer-Battered Artichoke Hearts Pretty much exactly as advertised. Bite-sized peices of artichoke heart, battered and crispy, with an amazing dipping sauce. These are great.

• Vee-Vee's African Cuisne
• Jerk Chicken with Red Beans and Rice This was a dissapointment. The chicken was not very good and very much full of fat and bones, very little meat, and the beans and rices were also not very tasty. Perhaps we would have gotten a meatier piece of chicken with the full sized portion instead of just the taste.
• Sauteed Goat and Fried Plantain This, on the other hand was very good. The goat was cooked well and has that somewhere-between-beef-and-venison flavor that makes goat good, and the plantains were just at the borderline between being potato-ish and banana-ish, which gave them just the hint of sweetness to offset the mildly spicy sauce. Delicious.

• Cousin's Turkish Dining
• Borek Spinach and Feta Cheese Pie. Spinach and feta in a crispy filo dough crust. While tasty, nothing overly exciting or special about this one.
• Tavuk Adana Spicy Ground Chicken, Greens and Cucumber Yougurt Sauce in a Pita. The greens in this consisted of iceberg lettuce and red cabage. But otherwise this was quite good. The chicken was spicy like breakfast sausage... just a hint of heat in the mouth, but no lingering heat, and nicely offset by the sauce.

I was thinking about Gmail invites and it occured to me... what if Google never makes Gmail "public"?
Maybe what they'll do is keep passing out invites until the users all have invites with no one left to give them to? You still need an invite to join, but getting an invite is very very easy. Would this help reduce spam? Probably not. Maybe an experiment in social networking. Who knows.

I've updated my photo display at the top of the page. This is another step for moving from Gallery to Pictorialis. I still need to link the thumbnails to their images and then, once I've moved the pics, limit the thumbnails to the "Blog" category. Thanks to Jesuit and unteins in #wordpress

Update 6-23:
Image linking is done!