So, as many of us sailors know, Navy Shellback Initiation is dying. I really think this ceremony is going to go before chief’s initiation and some would argue that it has already gone away. I’m starting a new photo gallery and want to add pictures of various shellback initiations throughout history. So, any photos you have that you want to share, send them to me via the contact page or make a comment in this thread and I’ll add them to the photo album.

Wordpress, the blogging platform that powers this and countless other sites, has release version 2.2.3 today. This version fixes a bunch of bugs from previous versions and has made changes to a few files.

I will be upgrading to this new version Sunday night.

This week, the Navy held their semi-annual advancement exams for all E-6 eligible candidates. Basically, every E-5 over 3 years and a few early candidates sit down and take a 200 question test with 115 questions on their specific rating and 85 questions on general military knowledge. This test, normally does not bother me. As a matter of fact, I do quite well on standardized tests, I always have. I’m also pretty good and predicting the results of these tests and the likelyhood of my advancement because, after all, it’s just a numbers game.
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I’ve decided to get this blog rolling off right with some helping blogging posts. The first of which is the best wordpress plugins I’ve seen. I’ve used each and every one of these plugins in my sites. Most of these are “must have” wordpress plugins and I wouldn’t dream of building a site without them. My list of Wordpress Plugins: Read the full story

It’s fairly late right now but I’ve finally finished the conversion and wanted to explain the second major change to the site.

GearAdrift was originally designed using Wordpress blogging software, but due to my lack of knowledge (at the time) of php and theming, I was quickly overwhelmed in trying to create a custom theme and integrate the old forum. I recluctantly converted the site over to Joomla and had a custom theme designed that worked great in the beginning.

I’ve come to realize that this was a mistake. Joomla is a great CMS for beginners but is very limited in it’s true functionality. I won’t get into the main problems here but it involves the ease of code manipulation versus Wordpress. Basically, I’ve come to realize that there is nothing that can be done with Joomla that can not be done with Wordpress (and a little scripting).

I do want to give a shout out to Chris at rangit.com for this very helpful post on migrating Joomla to Wordpress.