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I am about to upgrade this blog from WordPress 1.2 to Wordperss 1.5. It is very likely that the blog will look quite funked up for at least a little while. Your patience is appreciated.

Update: OK, this layout at least makes all the content visible to all major browsers, which believe you me is an improvement over what I was playing with on my staging site a few hours ago. I am aware that certain aspects of the formatting of the blog are now a bit screwy, particularly under Firefox and Safari. (And those are the browsers I use, so don’t think that what I’m about to say is a case of “You loony hippies with your weirdo browsers — why don’t ya just use Interweb Explorer like Bill Gates intends?”) But unless some super-smart CSS guru can say to me “Ah, these problems are simply fixed by [some series of tweaks that will take less than ten minutes]”, I’m afraid I might not have time to deal with it before I jet off to Greece.

A more pressing issue is the comments: the moderation queue seems suddenly more aggresive, tagging things as spam that aren’t spam. I urge all of you to try your hand at commenting here so I can see what is being caught by the spam blocker. If your comment doesn’t show up, please don’t post multiple versions of it; it’s just caught in the spam filter, and when I have a chance I will moderate it and make it live.

On the flip side, the fact that you no longer have to preview your comments before you can post them means that a lot of real spam will end up in my moderation queue, which will make my brain melt very quickly. Anyone with any WordPress 1.5 experience with suggestions on how to restore the previewing functionality, which seems to have been fried with the upgrade, please contact me.

Update the second: OK, OK, one problem solved… turns out that WP 1.5 is set to put all comments into the queue if the commentator hasn’t previously been OK’d. I think I’ve fixed that. Now to set it up to preview — I’ve got a line on that too. DEVELOPING… as Matt Drudge would say.

Update the third: I give up for now. I’ve had to turn off the comment pop-up for reasons to dorky and not even useful to go into here. Please let me know any functionality problems you’re having on this thread. Aesthetic problems will be dealt with after my triumphant return as a married man. Oh, and the timestamp problem isn’t new …. not that I know how to solve it. Ugh.

Last update of the night: OK, the previewing thing is now working! Whew.

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Hey kids: my original plan was to keep posting witty commentary right up to the moment of my impending nuptuals this coming Saturday (Sept. 10). However, with all the last-minute stuff to do, it’s become increasingly clear that this isn’t going to happen, especially considering that I’m already like five days behind. In addition, I just heard from my Web host that I have to upgrade my install of WordPress within the next week or so or my site will be shut down, which will eat into my valuable futzing-with-the-blog time.

Thus, I hearby declare today to be the beginning of my soft hiatus. I will probably post another metapost or two over the next few days, pertaining to the WordPress upgrade, the long-awaited Ira-themed tank tops, a contest for readers, and an exciting new concept which will be called the “ultra-post” and which I cannot reveal details about at this time. Then on Sept. 11 the future Mrs. C and I jet off for two weeks in Greece, sans laptop, so: no comics updates at all, till Sept. 26. But till then: keep watching this space for non-comics-related but hopefully still riveting material.

Update: Oh, yeah, I meant to ask: is there anyone out there who’s had experience moving a heavily tweaked and modified stylesheet from WordPress 1.2.x to WordPress 1.5? If so, please e-mail me. You’ll be remembered forever as “the person who helped Josh move The Comics Curmudgeon from WordPress 1.2 to WordPress 1.5.”

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OK, so there are going to be some real comics posts later tonight, but for the moment I have a question. A quick glance at my referral logs indicates that I’m getting dozens of hits today from people asking Google “What was the first comic strip to feature someone being shot to death?” or close variations thereupon. (Putting that text here on the front page of course ensures that I’ll just get more hits from people searching on it, of course.) I don’t know the answer, but I’d love to know why so many people are out there searching the Net for this tidbit when they should be working hard to boost the American economy. So can someone, possibly someone who is looking for this piece of information, tell me why everyone is so hot and bothered on the subject today? As a reward, I promise to post likely answers that people send to me.

Update: For those of you too lazy to look in the comments, apparently people are looking to win “points” of some sort by entering a trivia contest run by a radio station’s Web site, which posed the above brain teaser. Smart money from the smart folks who read this site is on Dick Tracy as the site of the first comics-cide. For the humor-impaired, pleased do not enter Love Is as your guess, as you will only embarrass yourself.