Just a quick update
Yes, I’m still alive. It has been more than a week since I last wrote, and I didn’t even really write.
I’m working on a few important projects right now, notably a WordPress–powered Filipino webzine. At the same time, I’m experimenting on my desktop with multiple weblogs in WP, trying to hack something that wouldn’t feel like a hack when used. 
I’m still playing with iPAP right now, not yet with MySQL support. Still with textfile–based storage, but with a fix that hopefully will eliminate any chance of database corruption. I feel the move to MySQL complicates a lot of things immediately, and if I really wanted to do that I would’ve just used something like Gallery, or used a web–based pay service like PBase. Still very much open to using a real database, if I find extended time to work on everything. But I’d rather go with SQLite, so that should be a good few months away. 
By the way, this site was featured on MaThIbUs’ list of recently redesigned weblogs. Along with several prominent web designers. What an honor!
You should consider it an honor well-deserved. BTW, is that “unrelated photo” thing automated? iPAP-driven?
kevan, the unrelated photos feature is a WP plugin I created, but I manually copy and paste image URL and links from my iPAP install. The plugin can be toggled to stop inserting the photos, whenever I want. It uses a single postmeta field for the inserted data.