I'm still having the tough issue of Windows Live Writer's "Web Layout" mode not working on this blog, which is darn weird because it was functioning fine in weeks before. What's even more wack is it's not working for the official Second Life blog either (!), and that's hosted by WordPress.com. In any case, I'm mid-email-correspondence with the awesome Joe Cheng (WLW dev), so let's see what happens.
My appreciation thus far for the responses to the quick-'n'-dirty poll I put up, it's 18 to 12 right now with 60% in favor of changing my blog theme. Since it's not an overwhelming lead, I'm still taking action — cleaning up some theme inconsistencies (gr, does Internet Explorer 7 and even 8 render like crap… layouts that appear fine in Firefox, Opera, and Safari look wrong in IE).
I took a long hard look at my blog widgets, and reorganized them for simplicity. In a funny twist of minimalism, I notice a lot of blogs show 5-10 recent comments, but I'm just showing the 1 newest one for now. Let's see how that goes. These are experiments and if they fail, I can keep adapting. I also merged my various creative activities into a single "Stuff you enjoy" widget on the left.
Last night, I must've looked at 100s of WordPress themes. Not a single clear winner stands out to me above Tiga, so I'm somewhat surprised. But I do like Sandbox's possibilities — if only I had more time & desire to customize. I've been getting design inspiration from some of my fave places like Zen Habits (which uses a custom theme, apparently… wonder who the designer is? I'm gonna ask).
I encountered problems post WP-2.5 upgrade with Popularity Contest and aLinks plugins: "fatal error". Thanks to Blogvaria, the former is solved. The latter is not and alinks.org is down, so this is a loose end.
I removed the video tutorials "sticky post" for now; it may be back at the top if things go well, as it was getting a fair amount of traffic and making it easy for people to watch my latest vidtuts. (There's also the question of whether I should only have vidtuts on my YouTube channel from now on or if the playlist I have on the main channel page is focus enough, then I can keep posting random fun…)
I just want to keep making awesome stuff for you to enjoy!
Let me know of any specific requests & recommendations. My wife found a pic of what my blog looked like in 2006, and we've come a long way. Today, a snapshot for posterity, as things will keep changing.