Dearest of all Mules, our wonderful poets, please give me a moment of your time to discuss the backend of the Mule. We use WordPress as our foundation, our backend, for publishing the Dead Mule. For years and years, Robert MacEwan (yup, my husband) would code a Mule template especially for me and I’d use it for a year or so, then he would write a new one using whatever coding advances had been made in the meantime. JAVA, .png vs .jpg, videos, you name it, all these changes kept slamming at us over the last ten years and we’ve kept up. The hardest part is keeping the Mule the same. Making up-to-date backend changes while maintaining the look of the Mule.

A couple years ago, we decided to try WordPress for the Mule. We used it ourselves as blogging software, so Rob built his MySQL database, we loaded the WP software (this was back with version 1.2, I believe). I have years of experience in computers — not meaning to brag but I’m trying to format this Mule on an Ubuntu Linux box — and I can keep up with most of the requirements of publishing a new Mule issue. HTML, GIMP, word processing software from MS Word, StarOffice, OpenOffice. AbiWord… on Macs, Linux (gnome or KDE), Windows 3.1 - XP, and on and on… going back to writing my undergraduate thesis in Lotus 1-2-3 (wow, does anyone remember that? It was the only software available for typing a paper with footnotes),

The point is: When it comes to publishing the Mule, I do the formatting because I enjoy it. It keeps my skills entact, challenges my level of knowledge, and gives me a chance to read over what the irreplacable  -mule -editors Phoebe Kate and Helen send me, if I haven’t already read it. It’s intensely personal. This Mule and everything that’s published on it  — is read here and edited here and in the words of the ever-questionable Harry Truman, “the buck stops here”.

So, back to the story… in the early days of Muledom, the 1998 Internet presence, we knew the Mule couldn’t be an angelfire.com/mule or a washington-nc.com/deadmule or pick a free hosting service at the time. We bought the domain name — back in 1996, domain names cost $60 and they had to be “mapped to the server” for another $100 or more.

This is a long story and I’ll finish it in the next blog entry… stay tuned… I really need to finish getting the poetry straight, perking it up, italics, indents, etc. and file some posts on The River of Strange.

-valerie macewan