I’m not sure how I ever became both lazy and particular.

For a guy who loves efficiency, I really do make things difficult for myself. Rather than let Movable Type handle all the details of publishing my sites, I instead code my interface to the database backend. When Musicwhore.org was more of a monstrosity, I could justify the extended code.

These days, I’m just set in my ways. I don’t want a bunch of static files sitting on my web space. I should know better — serving up static files is much more merciful on the processor than forcing it query a database and build content on the fly.

So in trying to make things simpler, I’ve made them more complex.

I spent the entire day setting up Rewrite directives in my .htaccess files so that I could get a uniform URL structure for all my sites. That way, musicwhore.org/entry/nnnn and gregbueno.com/entry/nnnn both behave the same way — they deliver the intended content. And I didn’t have to rename files or recode any queries.

It did, however, require a time-consuming, Herculean effort of template editing. I didn’t stop with just weblog content. The Musicwhore.org Archive artist directory has a new directory structure now, as does the Eponymous 4 projects section.

Once established, I could set something up I’ve been wanting to for some time — a unified RSS feed. That’s right folks — you can get all of my web sites in one feed now. I’ve got so many sites, not even my closest friends know all of them. Now they have no excuse. Let me spell it out for you:

http://www.gregbueno.com/index.xml

In addition to making consistent URLs, I added a plug-in to detect enclosures for select audio content. It doesn’t work the way I want it to, so I have to hack my entries a bit. I also put a few more MyBlogLog widgets and claimed three more sites on Technorati.

I don’t know if I really get Technorati. For the longest time, I wondered why the site wasn’t picking up the tags I put in my template, but then I noticed some tags I placed manually in one entry found its way to the site. So I spent a lot of time hacking my templates so that Technorati could pick up the tags in my RSS.

I’m not sure how it will help my sites, but we’ll see.

I really ought to go to bed now.