Another Opinion Among Many

Its been eleven months since I changed the design of this site.  Anyone who has persisted with my drivel over the years can attest that this is probably the longest period that this Wordpress installation has looked the same.  That is when I hacked Srinivasan G’s excellent Evanescence theme into what its become here.  I chose it because of the clean and clear code in the theme.  It allowed me to expand upon it and build something that I liked.  I can’t say that I won’t change again, but i still like what I came up with after all this time.  I may change it a bit here and there to either “tweak” what I have or to change the color a bit to reflect the season.  But, then again, I may not.

I checked out the websites of the commenters on the theme’s page and it looks like over 1/2 of them have kept the theme in use in its original design (which is quite classy, I must say).  I think that Srini should consider that a success.  And, although it really didn’t ever end up on my site in its original incarnation (especially since I snagged some code from another of his themes, which Ray uses), I am still content to use it as well.

So, have you kept the same theme? Are you happy with what you present to the world? Does it even matter to you?

Now that Firefox 3.0 is out, I bet there will be a ton of reviews of this milestone release.  I must say that it seems to be a lot more stable than it was.  The Mozilla team have really created an interesting monster this time.  I’ve been using the version on and off since it was first branched in the trunk.  it was scary to run at times back then.  I must say, though, that, since the RC1, its been quite stable and I don’t even know if I remember when it crashed, which is more than I can say for any of the 2.x versions.  I am not going to go ahead now and review what I’ve already commented on in earlier posts.  Kudos to the Firefox team, I say.  Now, guys and gals, can you somehow get your heads out of your asses and provide a switch to turn off your “improved” address bar?  Its the ADDRESS bar, not the “lets search any goddamn browser/search slowing term that you’ve ever typed or not tymed so that we can be your browser of choice for longer than you want us to be” behavior??? That’s my only peeve about the 3.0 version of Firefox.  The address bar is no longer an address bar.  Its a way to make you think Firefox sucks.  Give us a choice!

Of course, I write this in the new and improved, but hardly hyped, Opera 9.5 Kestral. The Wordpress editor is still funky in Opera, but its a lot better than it was.  Like, what’s the deal with you hitting “enter” like you would in any other browser to go to the next paragraph or thought and to be thrown to the TOP of the paragraph you just wrote? That behavior’s just gotta stop! I do like all of the other reasons that I’ve liked Opera, though.  Its FAST and its FAST.  Yes, its fast.  Pages seem to want to render like they’re supposed to and they arrive in front of my face in a speedy way.  Its too bad that it crashes on java applets all the time, though.

Damn, this is starting to look like a review. Its not - its just a rant. Rant, I say!

Well, I found a directory on my Wordpress install that I didn’t install the contents of.  My wp-content/uploads/ folder had a directory /2007/12 in it, which, in itself, wouldn’t be much to raise concern, but it wasn’t “owned” by me.  My web host confirmed that all files should be owned by me.  I couldn’t delete the folder, it seems.  I sure wanted to, because it contained 100s of html pages that were all redirects to scummy splogger sites.  So, I guess that I got hacked.  Folks, upgrade your Wordpress as soon as you’re advised of a security release.

When I changed my cPanel password, some wierdness occurred.  If you were browsing my site this afternoon, you might have caught the moment where there was no database connection.  You see, when you change your cPanel password, it changes your mail, ftp, and mySql passwords as well.  It took a minute for the system to all get working again.  When I was checking the mail to ensure that it still worked, I noticed that I had almost 8,000 emails sitting in my default mail account.  I’ve not actually configured an email account, as I use Google’s Gmail redirect service, where I can forward mails received by corey@ to my Gmail email and send as corey@.  Why not use their spam filtering, rather than manage my own?  So, these were the emails that were being sent to any whatever @coreythompson dot com since October.  I am sure that all of it was SPAM, so I set up squirrelmail to show 1000 mails per page and used “toggle all” and sent them to my trash folder and then purged the folder.  I then set up my mail settings to bounce all email to addresses without forwarding with a “no such recipient” message.  Hopefully, this will keep the unwanted emails off my server.

What a sucky happenstance.

So, the puddle at the end of our driveway is becoming the lake that is swallowing our driveway. I hope that we have a few days in a row of really sunny weather so that the snow will melt off some more, and, with any luck, the ground will thaw a bit and absorb some of the wet stuff. It would be nice if this was truly spring. After all, it IS April. I remember that this time last year, the utility that I work for was waiting for the run of warm enough days so that they could go and shut off the delinquents. Its amazing what you can scam out of your local utility in Ontario. No wonder the prices are going up, thanks to those who know how to fleece the system repeatedly.

My grandfather’s funeral consumed the weekend, of course, so we (Angela and I) spent much of Saturday and Sunday traveling. Despite the short stay in Nova Scotia, it was a pleasant time, with the exception of the funeral itself, of course. Saying all that, the minister who did the ceremony was excellent and his eulogy was that of a family friend, rather than that of a stranger making up encouraging words, which really made a big difference. He stirred up some memories with his own recollections, which was nice. Something that I didn’t know is that my grandfather (and great uncle) had two deceased infant sisters. I wonder how they coped with that as kids. I don’t really want to find out personally, though.

My brother gave me an old camera of his, a Kodak DX4900. Its not a bad camera - not quite as sleek as the Olympus, but it actually works as intended. I went to Future Shop and got a replacement Compact Flash card for it so that I won’t be limited to the piddly 16MB card that it came with. So, now instead of taking 24 pictures on my regular card, I can take 999 pictures on my Sandisk 2GB Ultra II card, which is supposed to be faster than a normal Compact Flash card. Its too bad that the camera doesn’t get recognized under Linux as a flash drive. At least gPhoto picks it up and wants to import your photos for you. Perhaps I should get a card reader for a situation like this.

Wow, what a buzz about Wordpress 2.5. I’m not going to say anything new about it, as the net is saturated with goop about everyone’s new installations. One thing I will warn, though, is the same thing that I warn every time. Back up your site before doing a major change to it! With Wordpress sites, that means, for sure, backing up your database. If you have cPanel, use its convenient backup feature, as its just a mouse click. Do the same for your home directory if you’ve had a lot of changes since you last backed up. At the very least, back up your /wp-content directory, so that your customizations on your theme and plugins will remain intact elsewhere in case a back up is needed. It can’t hurt to export your Wordpress blog via the built in export facility. There’s a lot of goodness in that .xml file.

Do you need a job? Do you live in the Fredericton area? My employer is still hiring. If you want the details, email me. I will refer you and you’ll make me rich! (okay, not rich, but their is an incentive, like a head hunter’s bounty). You’ll also get the chance to work hard and make lots of your own money, of course.

As anybody who’s bored enough to read even my blog knows, I am no stranger to software testing.  I’m no programming genius (that would be Lloyd, Westi, Matt, Linus, Devin, and others) at all, but I know how to find a bugzilla or bug reporting tool, and I do my best.  I’ve not alpha or beta tested Wordpress since 2.3 was released, as I’ve been concentrating more on Ubuntu lately (and there are some really nice touches that Hardy Heron is going to present to the world, very nice).

I’ve remained subscribed to the WP-testers mailing list, though, and I’ve been reading every post.  It looks like Wordpress is going to be a lot more friendly to the new user and have a lot more power for the power user.  I’m not sure if this blog will go through any more trauma or not.  I may keep with a stable (older) version until support is stopped.  But, I may move another over to 2.5 and see how easy it is to do the hard things.  BTW, there’s a lot of good discussion about it on the latest Wordpress Podcast

Will you be switching right away?

I’m just writing to advise anyone on a WordPress blog to check out your Plugins page in your Dashboard and review the ones that you have to see if they’re up to date.  If you’re running version 2.3 of WordPress, you will be told which ones are update, as long as the plugin author  uses the WordPress Plugins site to host and track their work.

As I did today (which I do about once every two or three weeks), why don’t you take a moment to ensure that your plugins are up to date.  This will ensure that you are running the least buggy and most secure version of your favorite plugins.

I will now!

Has anyone who has upgraded to WP 2.3 noticed what the default blogroll is? It seems that the whiners on the forums have won and got the authors’ addresses removed from the default. Now, there are helpful links to wordpress sites, like the codex. This is a good move, I think, but I wish that it wasn’t forced to become in the manner that it did. I honestly don’t think that the originals had ever thought of all the SE “juice” they’d get from being linked to all the blogs out there running WP being run by people who are too lazy to uncheck the links in the blogroll (I left a few in because I read those blogs - don’t worry, folks, you’ll be back in, likely this weekend, when I add that table back to my database).

On the other hand, would you still read my stuff if I wrote daily a one line post which linked to somebody else?