For those of you still using Microsoft Internet Explorer, you may have had difficulties reading Looka! since the WordPress changeover and, more recently, seeing the sidebar. If you’ve given up on us because of that — and are still, I hope, glancing at your RSS reader — please come back! The bug’s fixed (gaah, stray comment tags!), all is well, and IE users will have a trouble-free Looka! reading experience from now on. (But it would behoove you to switch to Firefox. And if you’re a Mac user, Safari works great.)

We now return you to your regularly scheduled weblog. Don’t let this distract you from reading “Go forth and conquer,” Wesly’s first Looka! post, if you haven’t already.

You’ve seen the boy’s name mentioned here enough times, and even got to read a bit of his writing here and there (such as when I was, um, too blotto to clearly remember the end of certain meals).  He’s an excellent writer too, and I thought it was a shame that more folks didn’t get to read his stuff.

So, after much suggesting, wheedling, cajoling, pleading, coaxing, flattering, obsequity, bewitching, bothering, alluring, urging, perseverence, ass-kissing and just plain nagging (“Ahh, ya will … go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, GO ON!!!”), Wesly Moore has agreed to become a (semi-)regular author and contributor to Looka!, when he feels like it.

He’ll be writing about … well, whatever tickles his fancy, be it cocktails or food or travel or whatever.  Now that I’ve publicly put him on the spot, I suspect he’ll have to come up with something soon.

Please make him feel welcome.  And of course, Team Chuck ‘n Wes means more free content!

Finally, this place is gonna start looking a bit more like it used to!

As of today, we’ve got the basic look of the blog down.  The theme is based on the free Vesper theme by Valen Designs, which had the kind of layout we were looking for, if not so much the exact look.  (I wasn’t really down wit’ da urnge.)

The custom Looka! theme was designed by my friend Marleigh Riggins Miller of SLOSHED! fame.  Not only is she a terrific cocktails and spirits writer and drink-maker, she’s a very talented graphic designer — the kind of stuff she does for a living — and she did a really lovely job.  It’s still a work-in-progress, and over the next few days or week or two we’ll roll out other features, including navigation along the header with links to full archives, an about page, a list of cocktail recipes (i.e., the old “Cocktail of the Day” feature, which I will gradually import into WordPress going as far back as I can), a page of links (instead of that really long frakkin’ sidebar) and maybe some more.  We’ll see!

I also want to thank my friend Jay Hepburn of Oh Gosh! (the UK’s premier cocktail and spirits weblog, in my humble opinion) for his preliminary work in helping get this place ported to WordPress.  He’s meeting Wesly and me at the Connaught Bar in London next Thursday, and I think there’ll be a drink or three there with his name on ’em.

Onward and upstairs!

My friend Matt the RumDood once told me, “Your blog takes friggin’ forever to load on my mobile.  I could start loading it, go eat lunch and then maybe I can read it afterward.”  Well, something like that.  He probably said something a bit more epithetic than “friggin’,” at least.

Well, gnash your teeth no more.  As of now, if you care to read this weblog on an iPhone, iPod Touch or Android phone, it’ll look like this:

Pretty spiff!  (Yes, I know I’m easily impressed, but this kinda entering-the-current-century stuff is all very new to me.)  You can read posts, comment, forward them, log in as a user/subscriber, forward to Twitter and a bunch of other social bookmarkers, or flip a switch to turn the mobile theme off and look at the full site. Alas, you can’t look at Flash videos, but that’s a limitation of the phone.  If you have some other kind of mobile, at least the new WordPress site should load a lot faster than my ridiculously bloated hand-coded versions did (most of which averaged around  200K of code alone, not counting pictures!).

Making life easier for our readers!  I’ll drink to that.

In order to claim this blog on Technorati, I must actually write a post (sigh) with the following code within it:

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I’ve actually got to clutter the place up with this? I can’t hide some code somewhere?  Meh.

Truly nothing to see here, move along, move along … next post is about booze!