php //comments_template();

That was in the “single.php” file, in my case. Your mileage may vary. Seems a little silly, but whatever. I can understand that WordPress is geared toward bloggers who use comments as the lifeblood of their sites, but I’m surprised that nobody gave much thought to the idea that people might want to work differently. In my case, I decided to drive this site’s comments with Facebook’s APIs. I’m not sure if I like it yet, and I’m not sure if I’ll keep it this way, but I really didn’t need a “comments” section for Facebook followed by another “comments” section pushed by WordPress telling people that comments are closed. Talk about confusing.

Speaking of the Facebook Comments section, I haven’t tested it yet, so… help me out?

That “y” is supposed to be the runic letter Thorn — Þ (uppercase) or þ (lowercase). Over time, the way the letter was written changed, until eventually it looked more like a backward “y” with a thin line on the top part. Easy to see why people copying old documents got confused and just wrote it as the letter Y, since Thorn was no longer in use in the English alphabet. So when you see a sign that says “Ye Olde…”, just pronounce the first word as “the” instead. That’s how it was originally intended.

Jeez, I love the Internet for learning stuff like this…

(Salvaged from the old blog…) 

Turns out, and this should’ve been obvious, that “gh” is the English equivalent to the German and Gaelic “ch” sound, like in “loch” (Scottish for “lake”) or “lachen” (German for “laugh”). It’s that same throat-clearing sound you hear in Hebrew, for instance, or when Germans talk about themselves (“Ich”). Again, holy cow! It used to be pronounced in English, but as modern English lost that sound, the pronunciation became silent or changed a bit, usually to an “f” sound at the end of words.

That’s… awesome.

I just happened to search Google and found this article. It’s a great piece, and everybody should read it. Sorry if this is old news to you, but it was pretty exciting for me!

Okay, now go back to whatever you were doing…

Previously, just for fun, in an earlier life, I had a little self-hosted blog going.  I didn’t spend a lot of time on it, I didn’t spend a lot of time writing on it, and it certainly wasn’t that interesting, except maybe to me.  I was using Blogger as my publishing platform, back when it had the ability to push changes to a self-hosted site over FTP.  At some point, they stopped allowing that.  And that was it for me. I didn’t feel like doing anything with my old blog and moving it to Google’s servers, and it became completely static.  Dead.  It was a ghost town on the web.

That was two years ago.

Then the other day, I started thinking…  I have 100GB of hosted web space that I’m not doing much of anything with.  How stupid is that?  I mean, at the very least, I should have a blog on there or something…

And then it was in my head.  Which is never a good thing.  So I installed WordPress and configured it.  And here we are.

I’ll write primarily about technology and language.  Or language and technology.  And there might be the occasional non-partisan commentary on political stupidity.  I also have a photostream going on here, which is something new for me, and I’m looking forward to keeping that updated.  I seem to take pictures wherever I am anyway, but now I have somewhere to put them.  It makes sense.  Check the photos out here.

So welcome. Now we’ll wait and see what happens…