Another Opinion Among Many

So, I’ve actually gotten around to it. If you’ve been visiting on and off over the last few days, you may have caught a glimpse of this new theme as I tested it out with this blog. I’ve been working on and off on it for a few weeks now and its ready for public consumption, I think.

There are a few other things I’d like to refine on it, but this is the way that its going go look going forward. Its a tad different than anything that I’ve done before and some of the structure hasn’t been seen often at all. You’ll notice that there’s no traditional sidebar on the side. I’ve moved it below the first post and the treat from the past. I’m moving some of the clutter from the front page to its own page, such as my blogroll. I’ve kept it trimmed for a long time, although my bookmark list is looooong! So, I will get to work adding to it so that the links page is fleshed out. Once I learn how, I’ll probably change the template for that page (and maybe the archives page as well) to a two column design, like newspaper columns. That way the list of links (and older posts) will be lined up in nice neat lines to be viewed with pleasure.

I was originally going to try coding this one from scratch, which is why I didn’t have anything up months ago. If you want to know the inspiration for this theme, you should visit the site of J David Macor, who is the theme author that ported Deliciously Blue from Glossy Blue. I replaced the icons with the excellent free Drunky Love ones by Kevin Wetzels. I’ve left footer links so that you can go and visit their sites for yourself. This theme is sponsored by no one.

You’ll notice that this theme doesn’t look much like the original any more, either by color and artwork, or by design. But, if you dig into the code, you’ll see that I’ve left much of the code intact (even the css naming, which I will eventually clean up). Expect a tag cloud at one point or another and perhaps something in a big block at the bottom, once I figure out whether I want anything down there.

Tell me what you think. I really like how this has turned out - especially the double wordpress loop. I hope that you do too, as I have wanted to free myself of the sidebar for a while. If you see that something is missing, please let me know. If you have browser weirdness, let me know, especially if you use IE6 or IE7, as I haven’t done much testing with IE6 and I’ve resisted IE7 so far on my Windows computer.

Well, its late here (at least for the time I got up yesterday morning) and my eyes are barely still open, so I’m off to bed. Comments are still unmoderated locally. I’m just relying on Akismet and SSP, so you should have no trouble commenting and seeing the results immediately.

By the way, I’ve used the colors in the picture that you see above as my palette for the theme. Those leaves were plucked off a tree on the way to Caleb’s school.

To answer your question, Macbros,

I am hosted with a company called DSTinternet, and yes they’re fast! I did a lot of research before I unleashed my wallet on them and I couldn’t find enough negative about this company to not use them. The pricing seems to fit my budget and the features are fantastic! The company responds to support requests nearly instantly via the chat box off the site. I haven’t tried phone support yet, so I don’t know if the number will be reachable from Canada. My only gripe is that the use the Plesk control panel and I’m used to cPanel. I’ll have to see if I can simply add IP addresses to a ban list, as I can with cPanel, or if I have to add them to my .htaccess file manually (which I will, you spammers!). They allow FTP access so whatever!

As far as the rest,

This site runs on Wordpress. I usually am running a nightly build from the development repository. I’m not quite nutso enough (but close) to go with SVN commits, but the snapshot may not work for me every time either. I test the installation with similar plugins and theming on my own computer before I replace what’s working on this site. I don’t “upgrade” every night - more likely every 10 days or so. The current version is 2.3 alpha.

I am using a completely hacked and modified version of the Fresh theme, which was ported to Wordpress by LEMONed from the original design by Wolfgang Bartelme. I haven’t even left the structure intact, as I’ve moved stuff all over the place. The theme is based on a header, footer, body, subfooter, and sidebar. It has 3 sidebars (2 custom ones for individual pages, to which I employ the Page Template function) and 3 footer/subfooters. It will not always be the one I use. There’s something being cooked up in the background…

This site uses these plugins:

• Antileech - Prevent errant parties from stealing your content and bandwidth. By Owen Winkler.
• Archivist - Selects a defined number of (random) posts from the archive and shows them on the front page By Martin Chlupáč.
• Bad Behaviour - Deny automated spambots access to your PHP-based Web site. By Michael Hampton.
• Compact Monthly Archive - Displays a compact montlhly archive instead of the default long list. By Rob Marsh, SJ.
• Digital Fingerprint - adding a customizable “digital fingerprint” to your RSS feed in posts. By Kirk Montgomery.
• DoFollow - Disable the “nofollow” tagging for comments. By Kimmo Suominen.
• Extended Comment Options - This plugin allows you to switch comments and/or pings on or off for batches of existing posts. By Mark Kenny.
• Extended Live Archives - Implements a dynamic archive, inspired by Binary Bonsai and the original Super Archives by Jonas Rabbe. By Arnaud Froment.
• Fancy Pullquotes - Creates pullquotes of given text to appear with a magazine-like style By Giorgio Gilestro.
• Google AJAX Search - Adds a Google AJAX Search box on your site. By http://dancameron.org.
• myQuote - myQuote is a simple and small Wordpress plugin which enables you to place a Quote or Text on your website. By Jesper Avôt.
• Photopress - Photopress adds some image handling tools to Wordpress, including a popup upload and browse tool, a random image template function, and a simple album. By Isaac Wedin.
• Recent Comments - Retrieves a list of the most recent comments. By Nick Momrik.
• Related Posts - Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches. By Alexander Malov & Mike Lu.
• The Excerpt Reloaded - This mod of WordPress’ template function the_excerpt() knows there is no spoon. By Kaf Oseo.
• Ultimate Tag Warrior - Ultimate Tag Warrior is a tagging plugin, that’s heavy on tag visualisation. I Like Pi! By Christine Davis.
• Wayback - generate a list of posts from a previous period. By Chris Goringe.
• WP Grins - A Clickable Smilies hack for WordPress. By Alex King.
• WS Tooltips - Let’s you display cool JavaScript fading tooltips! By Christopher Hartmann.

For the moment, that’s all, but I will be changing and moving things around now and then. I have more plugins installed but not activated.

That’s about it for now.  If I’ve left anything out, I may add to this post later.

Attention, passengers. This flight may experience some turbulence as it moves to a new host. As your captain, I caution you to keep comments light, as they may not make it to the destination. I will be trying to preserve the integrity of things by employing the technique in this post, especially in regards to the comment by Bes Z.

Edit:

I couldn’t, for some reason, access my domain registrar’s panel last night, so the site was still “live” at the old host. Interestingly enough, though, as soon as I changed the DNS server settings to point to the new host, I was “live” there, according to a ping that I just sent. Wow! I’m even using Rogers’ DNS servers for name resolution here at home. Cool.

For those who are in areas where DNS takes longer to propagate from North America (specifically, Texas), there still should be no issues posting comments, as I’ve got the site still up at the old host, pointing to the database on the new one, as the link shows to do.

I’d like a bit of feedback about the move. Let me know if you still “see” the site as it was. My email address is in the sidebar, if you want to let me know that way. If that doesn’t seem to work, try mrcorey at gmail dot com. Leaving a comment here should work fine, though.

I was looking around the net to see what has been said about this year’s early change to Daylight Savings Time (DST) in the United States (US) and found this CNN.com article.  I clicked on a link to view a video and it actually played! The last time that I checked any rich media on the CNN site (or anything simple like page navigation for that matter), I was advised that I needed to upgrade my Windows Media Player before viewing the video.  That’s not a simple task on Linux, as you have to have a licensed copy of Microsoft Windows and have installed WINE and the flaky Windows Media Player under emulation.  Then, you have to get your browser configured to play media with this hacked emulation.  That’s too much.

So, the video played with the mplayer plugin.  This should be the case anyhow, as mplayer is one of the best all around players out there.  Its Windows GUI could use some work, but it still outplays most other players, as it handles almost any codec.   The CNN website merely said that the video was optimized for Media Player 9 and that they couldn’t determine my version, but that I could go ahead and watch if I wanted.  Right on.  The complaints worked (’m sure that I wasn’t the only one who wrote to the webmaster about their lack of accessibility).  Cheers, CNN.  Now about your news reporting…

I’ve seen a lot of sites, especially blogs, lately, that use a form of link exchange to try to enhance their search engine ranking. After reading this article by Lorelle on Wordpress, I’ve decided that she has written a good piece (most of her writing is good stuff anyways) about how to get your site on the search engine and ranked well. The secret is to do what the search engines help documents tell you to do. I won’t rewrite Lorelle’s article, as she does an excellent job herself. Go read it. You’ll change your mind about how you’re currently doing things.

The short story is that “Webrings” don’t work. Once you’ve gotten through the spin campaign, there’s no substance. Who’s gonna want to come back to that? The secret is to not look like a spammer. Write good stuff, consistantly. Stick around. Keep doing it. You’ll climb. If you’re participating in a link exchange scheme, be sure that you’re doing it for referrals of visitors from the link you exchanged with and not necessarily from search engines later. This behaviour usually scores you lower with them.

Gimicks don’t work. Write good stuff, consistantly. We’ll come back.

I’ve been thinking about things on websites that either help or hinder the reader. I know that an ugly site is not fun to be at or read. I also know that many attractive sites are just that - atractive. They don’t have any content. So, here I am, solicitning opinions about what’s important to you when you visit a website. What does it need? Should it have a pretty header image and lots of “bling”, like smilies on the comment page (if its a blog or forum, for example)? Should it be simple and content-full?

Do you like to see blogs with a chronology of full posts for the last 30 days? The last 5 posts? Is it better if there are images included? What if you get an excerpt of each post on the first page and the details when you click on the post?

Do you peruse the blogrolls of the blogs you visit? Are related links important? Do you follow links if they’re presented in articles? Or, do you follow recommended links that may relate to an article? Do you think that tags are important?  Do you follow them? What about categories?  What about the side bar? What do you pay attention to? Do you prefer 2-column, 3-column, or only one column, when you are visiting a site?

I know that I have asked a lot of questions, but that’s just the beginning. There are more points that could be raised, but I don’t want to lose you in all the questions. I ask because I want to make your stay here a pleasant one, and I don’t want to inconvenience anybody who wants to come here. If there’s anything that you don’t like about this site, I’d love to know. If there’s anything that you really like, I’d also like to know (what I did right!). I think that this sit’s theme is a decent compromise between simple and complex. I do try to make the content (yeah, that scratching I call writing) the reason you might come back, but I am sure that doesn’t always work. Let me know what you think. I’d be interested in what makes people visit or return to a website, especially a blog-style site.

I’d ask that you refrain from commenting that the thing that you don’t like is my point of view or opinion, though, as I’ll consider this to be an off topic comment and it may “dissappear”. If you have a difference of opinion to one of my posts, please keep it to the post that you have issue with, so that it’s on topic and useful to those who read (see, I don’t mind opposition - I just want it clear to the reader what you’re opposing).

So, what do you think about websites?

My car’s been out of commission for the last week, as the heater core decided to go on it and the car started spitting green stuff like an alien on an old Flash Gordan movie (wait, that looked more black than green, as it was black and white). For those who are of the Platinum card-touting, SUV-I-dont-care-aboutfuel-economy crowd, you won’t even come close to understanding this. But, you can try if you want. This is a $400 repair job, pretty much (Including the tow I insisted on - wanted to still have an engine to work on, after all). That $400 is about $400 too much for me to be able to afford, so the car remains parked until payday.

But anyhow, I’ve been using the transit bus to get around town when I needed to. However, the bus pretty much sticks to an hourly schedule, without running at all mid-morning, mid-afternoon, or any time between 6:30 and 10:30pm (or so it seems). They don’t go more frequently, it is said, because the ridership won’t support the added runs. I don’t know what those that plan these things are using for data, because they’ve never tried it. I’m sure that there hasn’t been any real poll to the effect either, as I would have been advised by someone, for sure, if not participating.

So, after that bit of a rant, I wonder if anyone else feels that there would be sufficient interest in using the transit bus if the runs were expanded a bit more and the bus came by more often. If you think so, leave a comment. Who knows where this will go. If you’ve never commented before, I don’t mind if you start. Just remember that I approve all first time comments from an email address to protect against spammers but once I get to your comment (usually within hours), you’ve got free reign to comment as you please from then on!

If you’re from the Fredericton area and would like your “vote” recorded on a possible petition to change the transit system, start your comment with a capital letter “F” (or email me to let me know). I doubt that this will get that far, but I don’t know. My website stats say that I am, by far, not the only one who hangs out here from time to time.

So, if I could get to and from work on time (which I can’t) by bus, I’d probably leave my car parked except for out of town trips and grocery runs. But, that’s not practical in today’s situation. Maybe we can change that this time around.