Compared to my former 71 wpm in QWERTY, my peak in DVORAK is only around 55 wpm. Of course, this is partly because whenever I use any computer other than my own, it’s in QWERTY. If there’s someone who can maintain finger fluency in two keyboard languages, they have all my respect. I’m not like that. And I’m not quite sure what my typing speed on QWERTY has dwindled down to. If there’s a potential to type faster, that’s just in ideal situations. As for any possible ergonomic benefits, that simply doesn’t matter. Switching back and forth between two keyboard layouts does not work.

Goodbye, DVORAK. I’ll miss your home-row words like “the” and “sound”. I’ll miss the lack of single-handed words. But none of my friends like you so it just won’t work out.

When I went to my site to post a few article updates, it was gone. Just a generic landing page with annoying ads instead of the fansite that I had toiled over for so long.

I immediately went to the GoDaddy site to renew my domain as well as my webhosting, which I discovered had also expired. As I was scrambling to type in various numbers, I was thinking to myself: When was the last time I backed up the database? Are all the files on my local machine the same as those that were online when my site was last up? So this is what all those best practices are really about.

Fortunately, shortly after my payment went through, everything was back to normal. All the files, the databases–it was all saved even though GoDaddy could’ve gotten rid of it all if they wanted to. I just have to thank them for making it so easy to get it all back.

Then I went straight to the forum to post an apology to any visitors who had seen that awful page. By evening, there was a response from someone who was afraid I had just given up on the site and was thankful it was back up.

Yep, that’s what makes it all worthwhile.

At this moment, there are 5,855 plugins in the WordPress plugin directory. If so many other people have done it, surely it can’t be too hard, right? But I spent countless hours reading the documentation months ago and never had anything to show for it….

Well, this time I’m going agile. I wrote a post asking “What is 2 + 2?”, added a custom field called “correct” with the value 4, and now have the code to make that answer appear underneath the blog entry. It took me a while to figure out that I needed to pass $content to my function to keep the post from disappearing, but it looks like I’m on my way.


add_action( 'the_content', 'the_pop_quiz' );
function the_pop_quiz($content) {
echo $content;
$flif_pid = get_the_ID();
$pop_quiz_answer = get_post_meta( $flif_pid, 'correct', true );
echo $pop_quiz_answer;
}