eureka! i figured out a work around to do what i want in wordpress. woo hoo! in the words of david cope, it's all about "massaging the data". or in this case, massaging the templates i'm using in wordpress to create the output i want to see. so a few templates will not be so dynamically clever but who's going to know but me? when you view the html generated, you can't see the raw php to know what fudges i have made.

i'm so relieved at this work around. now the test version i'm mucking with looks almost perfect. now it's about refining the look. i picked one theme i liked and started changing things. i'm not sure if i'll keep doing that or start a new theme from scratch. the problem with using someone else's template is it's their template. you don't know it intimately. it might not meet all your needs. my problem is i don't fully understand all of wordpress or movable type to be able to really create a full theme from scratch. i constantly have to look at the manual and various web sites when the manual is not sufficient. then of course there's all the recipes to create and photos to take of the actual food!

i haven't sketched out a timeline of when i want everything done but i'm hoping to get all this technical stuff out of the way by the end of summer. i better hurry up and register the domain name i have in mind before it's no longer available. perhaps this will be live and ready to share with the world by the end of the year.