Hey there everyone. If you’re running Wordpress (like I am), then you will want to upgrade your install to version 2.2.1. See the release announcement here. There are some security fixes in this one, so get it (or run the development build like I do and see what breaks…).
After trying something different with the layout of my site, I’ve decided that for now, the idea will have to mature some more. One of the things that I noticed with the way that I was presenting the “loop” in my theme was that specific views like categories or search results would only show the first post, so I have to explore what I am doing to the Wordpress loop a bit more before unleashing it on the world again. This doesn’t mean that I won’t soon. It just means that my test run brought some unexpected results. Thanks for being my guinea pigs. I’ll have to get on it so Deliciously Maple can relive.
So, I’ve been all over the computer this weekend. I downloaded the ISO image of the Vector Linux 5.8 SOHO edition to play with. I’ll be doing a review of it later, after I get to try it out a bit. This is the first time that I installed Vector after two others, so its was a good test of a new situation for me. There was a bump or two but, otherwise, it went well. Wait until you see the screen shots. I had to modify the configuration file for the bootloader to boot the other operating systems, which is a bit disappointing, but I anticipated that. It was yet another distro that didn’t recognize my Envision monitor properly (none of them do) but at least there was a message after configuration that stated I may have to adjust things. That was nice.
I’ve also put in a few refinements to the new theme. I hope that you like them. Notice that my middle section (former sidebar) has a slightly different layout. I’ve slid the blogroll (the entire one this time) to the bottom of the section and replaced the side column with tags, so that finding things by subject is easier. That has actually led me to think about another caveat of using the Wordpress loop this way, that I will have to resolve. It involves the use of the if is_whatever() and else conditional tags.
You may also notice that the Links page is fleshed out a bit and seems a bit more complete. I’ve tried to add descriptions to all the sites that I have linked to. I had a bit of an issue with my database a while back and lost all my categories for the photo album, so I’ve been working on getting that back in order again as well. Bear with me on that one.
And, to thicken the plot, I’m also doing this on one of the latest nightly builds of Wordpress 2.3 (still alpha), which seems to be working alright, except for one small thing that I have to test some more. I haven’t seen any new tag functionality over UTW, but there are some other neat things that I like. By the way, did anybody who upgraded to 2.2 notice that plugins that cause problems will be automatically deactivated instead of borking your whole site until you FTP in and remove or rename the offender. Its getting better. There’s been talk about an upgrader. We’ll see how that goes.
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.
I’ve decided to try something different for commenting on this site. As I have mentioned in a previous post (not too long ago), I have disabled “first post” moderation on this site, to encourage those who would otherwise not comment to do so (and please do). I decided to rely on the Bad Behavior Plugin and Akismet (I know, I know - I said things about relying on an outside server…). I’ve done that for a couple of days and its worked so far. The thing is that Bad Behavior seems to be blocking certain IP ranges since the ISPs host these spammers in droves. The problem is that its blocks legitimate commenters like hari and Sindhu. This is not acceptable in my book, so I’ve taken a different approach. So, after seeing this article at Weblogtools Collection, I decided to disable BB2 and enable TanTanNoodles Simple Spam Filter. I still have “first post” moderation disabled. I hope that this works. This would be great if SSF and Akismet blocked all the baddies and everyone could comment right away. I have my fingers crossed.
This doesn’t mean that I’m done. I still think that this would work and sometimes I will just have to ridicule the bad ones.
I recently wrote about what runs this silly place. One of the things I mentioned (okay listed in FULL) was the list of plugins that I currently use on my Wordpress blog.
Changes:
removed
- Extended Live Archives (I wanted a different look)
- Related Posts (WP 2.3 broke it, like the get_links function)
added
- Aizatto’s Related Posts - Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches. Inspired by Related Posts By Ezwan Aizat Bin Abdullah Faiz.
- Clean Archives Reloaded - A nice, uniform, single-query, moo.fx-enhanced way to display your post archives. By Viper007Bond.
- No Self Pings - Keeps WordPress from sending pings to your own site. By Michael D. Adams.
- Plugin Output Cache - Provides a caching mechanism for the output from plugins. The cache is cleared whenever the blog content changes. By Rob Marsh, SJ.
- WordPress.com Stats - Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key. By Andy Skelton.
So far so good. If you’ve noticed a few images on older posts not showing, its partly my fault for not properly uploading them to my host. There seems to be an issue with directory permissions that I’ve still got to sort out with the built in image uploader as well, but I’ll figure that out. I’m sure that’s also my fault.
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.
