Okay, I've finally figured it out!  

The post order was messed up because of the time zone setting.  I wrote the first post to welcome my blog to the world, and then I started configuring my WordPress installation - including little things like the time zone.  By changing the time zone from UTC to -5, that impacted all future posts, but not any past posts.  Therefore, the system was behaving as though I had written the first post five hours into the future.  I figured out that you can change the date and time a post was published, so by subtracting five hours everything is in line again.

Phew!  

Well, after thinking about it, I've decided to remove the posting via email feature from my site.  Anywhere that I can send an email, I can also post directly using the web interface, so it really only bought me geeky coolness and no actual functionality.  The only slight exception is that I could have sent emails using my MTS BlackBerry, but do I really need to be able to update my blog no matter where I am at any time?  In the words of Dr. Evil:

How about no, Scott.  

If I just can't live without jotting down my thoughts for my massive readership posterity, I can always type it up on my BlackBerry and email it to myself, then post it when I'm at a computer.

You know, blogging is kinda fun when I let myself go free.

This is peculiar...  My post order for the first three entries is wrong.  At the top is the first post I wrote using the web interface, then it's the second email test post, then finally the first email test post.  I thought blogs generally sorted with the newest post on top.  So, why is the oldest post on top, followed by the newest post, followed by the middle post last?  Bizarre.

This post is simply to see where it ends up in the list.

Well, it took me a while but I figured out how to get the emailed posts to display. You have to manually browse to /wp-mail.php in order for them to be processed. That's not very convenient! There are some automated ways around this, though. What I've done is set up a cron job on my web server to run every five minutes to basically hit that page for me. We'll see if it works. Of course the five minute interval just passed, so now I have to wait four more minutes.

Hi there,

This is simply a test post. WordPress has a cool feature where you can post by email. Here's how it works. Create a private email account that only you know about. Since I own and manage my own domain, that's very easy for me to do. If you don't manage your own domain you could see if your internet service provider (ISP) allows you to create new email accounts. You could probably also set up a Gmail account with POP enabled, but I haven't tested that (no need to in my case). At any rate, once you have this email account, you configure WordPress to log into this account to check the mail there. Anything that gets sent to this private mailbox will get posted on the blog. Pretty cool, huh?

That's it for now.
Later!

Good morning!

This is my second attempt at a blog.  I think that the first attempt failed because I wasn't sure what I wanted to put up there, so then it stagnated as a result.  Do I know what I want to do now?  Not exactly, but I've got some ideas.  I think trying to limit myself to only discuss certain things within a very narrow category was the problem.  This time around, I'm going to place no restrictions on it.  Why should I?  After all, this is my blog!  

As it stands right now, there is only the default theme selected.  This will of course be changed in short order.  I will also change the layout.  One thing that kept me away from running my site using blogging software as opposed to some other types of content management systems (CMS) is that I didn't think you could do static pages well.  As it turns out, I'm wrong.  I saw some sites/blogs using WordPress that also had many different static pages.  I liked that!  For example, if I want a section for photos, I'd like them all to be gathered together.  Maybe for something like that I'll find that having post categories won't be good enough.  Then again, maybe it will.  Who knows - this is all part of the unrestricted blogging clause I have for myself.

Well, that's it for now.  I'm off to play around with the layout, theme, etc.  Later!