While I could do something like hiding .pagelist ul ul ul in CSS, and then making .pagelist ul li.current_page_item visible, the nexted lists under .current_page_item always looked kind of stupid, since there's no way to style them individually. So I looked to squible. because I remembered karrde dealing with a submenu that showed other children of the current page's parent. so now my menu looks like this:

<div class="floatmenu">
<h2 id="page-title"">Mapping</h2>
<ul class="pagelist">
<?php wp_list_pages('exclude=164,202&sort_column=menu_order&depth=2&title_li='); ?>
</ul>
<h2 id="page-title"">Contents</h2>
<ul class="pagelist"><li><ul>
<?php /* karrde is a GOD. this comes from squible */
$kids = get_pages('child_of='. $post->ID);
if (count($kids) > 0) {
wp_list_pages('depth=1&sort_column=menu_order&title_li=&child_of='. $post->ID);
} else {
if ($post->post_parent != 0) {
wp_list_pages('depth=1&sort_column=menu_order&title_li=&child_of='. $post->post_parent);
}
}
?>
</ul></li></ul>
</div><!-- floatmenu -->


Now we get two menus, one of which shows projects and graphics, and their subpages (sortdepth=2 hides the subpages of the projects). The second menu shows only the children the current page, or the children of current page's parent. Works great for pages inside a project (example), or project pages (example). But when you're looking at Projects or Graphics, you get the same sub pages listed twice. Fixing that also fixed the styling issues with having a nested list in .current_page_item:

.pagelist .current_page_item li {
display: none;
}

HA! I love it. This won't work for every CMS use of wordpress. It works for me because i have relatively few 1st and 2nd level pages, and a whooooole lot of 3rd level pages.

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Originally uploaded by sunburntkamel.

yeah, that whole idea of giving squible a sidebar is giving me second thoughts.
i still love having a sidebar. but the way things are sliced, i have to be on tiptoes about not having my sidebar get longer than my content. that means i've already maxed out my neat little friends area. boo.
also, i have a very small amount of information i can store in my bottom block. so i have 2 options:
option 1:
keep the black sidebar, but split it at the seam in the main panel, so that i can fit more in the bottom block, and let the sidebar flow down past the bottom of the squiggly.
problems:

1. the bottom edge of the squiggly isn't clean. i don't want to re-render to make it such
2. i have to double all of my CSS selectors. the CSS is already 12Kb

option 2:
flip the sidebar to the left side, and widen the images. dispose of the black section altogether. despite the fact that i really like the black section, this will make the blog more aesthetically similar to other sections of the site.
problems:

1. requires re-slicing the images.
2. left sidebar on a right-weighted image: might draw your eye to the content, might just be completely unbalanced.

fortunately, i fared better this time. my upgrade actually took. but saying it worked would be quite a stretch. first thing to happen: none of my admin panels would open (except the dashboard). fortunately logging out and dumping the cache worked.

second thing i noticed: my feed stopped working. well, actually feedburner just says the root of the document is malformed. what's a blog without a feed? 1999.

thrid thing i noticed: squible is now spewing mySQL errors. ok, switch to another theme. k2 is spewing fewer errors. but there are no post pages. no, wait, all of my permalinks are broken. after a whole lot of futzing, i try editting the blog URI, because everything seems to be missing the 'index.php' section of the address.

now my blog's completely fucked. it can't read it's stylesheet, i can't use any of the admin pages, so i can't even fix the error. i try digging through phpMyAdmin, but i'm not an SQL expert, so i have no idea where to find or how to fix the blog URI value. as of writing, no one's responded on the support forums.

the thing that pisses me off is posts like this by wordpress team members, who make it seem like there's something wrong with you if you're not upgrading.

i ran a test blog, i ran the release candidates, but what was released barely resembled the release candidates. what was released was as stable as my ass after a couple burritos.

so as soon as i can, i'll be removing 2.0, reinstalling 1.5.2, and most likely having to wipe and re-import my database. (the downgrade script notwithstanding)(i think if i try the downgrade script i'll have the same blog URI issue with 1.5.2).

Originally uploaded by OllyHart.

despite being super slick looking, this image is a great example of what's wrong with 90% of blogs.

scrolling. and scrolling. and more scrolling.
it's the freebird of user interfaces. squible defaults to posting only an excerpt of one entry, and linking to the rest. i'm not sure about excerpting the post, but showing only one post at a time is much better. linking to old articles in the next spot down ensures that anyone used to reading blogs will at least have something to click on, even if the miles of old entries aren't there.

still, there are some things that aren't intuitive. when you go into any archive page, all you get are excerpts. excerpts stripped of any formatting, and with no (read more...) link. especially in the case of the asides category, this isn't the most usable.
asides are generally a quick post with a link. if there's no link, why are we reading it? might as well just be a headline.
simple enough to fix, i just need the time to do it.