So today I’m trying to update to Wordpress 2.1. In the vein of Fark headlines, wackiness ensues. It seems like all of my posts are loading every time I go to my main page, even though I have the thing set to only display the ten most recent posts, and naturally my categories and such are all screwed up.
Worst of all I don’t really know why this is occurred. A Fubared installation, or is this all normal since I haven’t upgraded other elements of the site in awhile (e.g. plugins, themes)? Anyway, if you’re loading up the site bear please hit the stop button so you don’t strain my bandwidth by loading up every image I’ve ever posted here bear with until I can get all of this resolved.
Update:
Managed to get the displaying-every-post issue resolved, however I’m still having trouble getting my links to display the way I want them to. Unfortunately I’m becoming increasingly convinced the the clumsy Link Category / Blogroll functionality is by design in WordPress 2.1, so I can no longer have invisible lists of links but will always have an empty and useless category (see: Additional Links) on my sidebar. Oh well.
I’ve also switched over to K2 for the time being. I really do like K2, mostly for the sidebar modules, but I’m not sure if I’ll stick with it. I’m going to give it some time and see if I can accustomed to it.
I’ve also installed htakismet, a plugin that presumably identifies spammers via Akismet and then blocks them from visiting the site — I’m interested to see if this can cut down on the amount of spam I get, although I’m hoping it doesn’t block out any actual humans. If it does, well, email me at ~gmail.com — Assuming you can read this post, which you probably wouldn’t be able to.
So yesterday I was going to upload the high-resolution version of the Unreal Tournament 3 trailer when I checked in and noticed that I hadn’t uploaded anything at all to Wordpress this year. I could’ve gone into the innards of Wordpress and made all the requisite directories and whatnot to hold uploads, but I figured I’ve been putting off uploading these images for about a month now and I may as well clear them out of my queue.
Now that I’m thinking about it, I’ll probably try to update my Wordpress install tomorrow. Lets hope it goes smoothly.
We’re well into 2007 already, so I figure I may as well make a resolution for myself. My resolution is to get all of my computer-related effects in order. This, of course, is a monumental task that I’ll be lucky to accomplish this year, but it’s worth it. I need to do this for my peace of mind, as it’s really difficult for me to move on to new things when I feel like what I already am invested in is in disarray.
Computer organization is a pretty broad category, so I guess I’ll define some subcategories
Blog — Getting the blog here in a state that I’ll be happy with for the foreseeable future.
Images — Getting all of my images organized in a sensible way, preferably with some sort of easy tagging system for quick searching across all images on my hard drive. I have many gigabytes of images accumulated over the years, so this is probably the most substantial task.
Music — Same as with Images, but with substantial amounts of work already done. Mostly this involves copying the music from the rest of my CD collection onto my computer and then backing it all up on DVDs.
Programs and File Structure — This one isn’t all that big, but most of the work here seems to be in planning. Windows programs tend to like to install shortcuts to themselves on the Desktop and in the Start Menu… And while I have my Desktop relatively clean of extraneous program shortcuts, my Start Menu is a mess. Ideally I need to think up some good categories (e.g. “Audio Programs”, “Photography/Video Programs”, etc) and organize that way. Unfortunately it’s not quite that easy, with some programs fitting in multiple categories, or related and synergistic programs being broken up into different categories…
First task in organization? Well, I’m going to clean out my blogroll a bit and possibly add some more structure to it (although I don’t know if I’ll bother with the latter — I tend to view the blogroll as my own personal reference for sites to read). I also added a new page with an extended blogroll to it so that I can keep my frontpage blogroll short and unintimidating, but provide more links and resources for people who find they have similar tastes.
I’m going to be attempting to roll out some changes here in the next couple of days. For awhile now I’ve been unhappy with PopURLs‘ selection of websites to syndicate and been hoping to create a similar sort of aggregator of aggregators for myself. Mostly this is for my own convenience in being able to browse things I want to read with complete control over the layout and other elements, but I suspect other people may be interested in it as well so I’m going to try and make it publicly available.
At this point in time I haven’t decided how that is going to impact the design of this page (if at all), although I have been wanting to do some of my own theme work here for awhile now. A new theme may be forthcoming for the site as well, to fix nagging issues I’ve had with this particular theme as well as to personalize the site some more. If you see anything weird or unusual here in the next few days you know why.
One thing that has always amazed me about WordPress is simply how many bad themes exist for it. If you’re interested, mosey on over to the Theme Browser and take a look for yourself. In a basic browsing themes I find about 1% of these themes visually interesting. That said, visually interesting themes usually mean somewhat overbearing themes. On further inspection I found a number of more generic themes that I thought could work well.
I downloaded a few and had at it. Strange how you won’t notice the immediate flaws of a design until it is already on your site.
- ChaoticSoul — This design looked nice until I loaded it up on my site and I realized that it was overriding the blog’s title with the theme name. How rude. After a few seconds I also noticed that it had no categories, no archives, truncated every post after the first… Definitely needs work.
- Anthurium — I don’t know why I downloaded this theme at all. I must have misclicked, I swear.
- Kurtina — A nice design that I downloaded despite knowing it didn’t fit this blog. I thought it might be nice to look at and possibly modify. On loading it up my eyes can barely stand to look at it, it is so bright. It also has the truncated posts after the first, a stylish but ultimately bad decision. I don’t want people to have to click any more than they must in order to navigate the site.
- SlatyStain — Theme broken by ir2ImageSnag.
- SG/Dark — I downloaded this design mainly because it is unique, putting most of the navigational elements in the footer of the page. Upon actually loading it up here I can see that its functionality is really very bad though. It displays a maximum of two posts and displays them side-by-side in two columns. It’s a pain to read and it’s obvious why, for usability’s sake, this sort of innovative layout doesn’t work. Good try though.
- Manji2 — The two main problems I have with this design are that the sidebar is on the left rather than the right and that the site name is not included in the header area. The only other issue is the way that it clutters up the blogroll with my descriptions of the URLs contained therein.
- Terracotta — A nice theme with some problems. Main issues that I want to resolve are potentially moving the sidebar to the right side of the layout and improving the distinctiveness of post headings. It also needs borders around image tags to blend images more fluidly into the layout.
Currently I’m going with Terracotta, although by tomorrow I may have either changed it to Manji2 or back to the default theme. I do like the play of Terracotta with the title, which is primarily why I chose it. At least it has full functionality, unlike most of the others. I’m not sure when I’ll have time to get around to working on my own theme, I suspect it’ll be one of those projects that stays on the backburner for awhile. I’m pleased though, got something substantial accomplished that I can check off my list.
Now that I have some free time I hope to be able to customize the look of the site some more, as well as finalize other important aspects of the site… Such as the name, and just about everything else. Clearly we’re still in transitional stages.
Currently I’m trying to decide if I want to create my own Wordpress theme from the ground up, or if I should take the usual route of modifying an existing template. I’m leaning towards the former as it will be a good learning experience for me.
Here I am, I finally have a blog.
I bought this domain over 8 months ago with the intention of shortly starting my own blog. Unfortunately a series of events conspired to delay that plan. First, I started work on a large project that I continue to work on regularly. Second, I was harassed and cyberstalked by a certain disgruntled and mentally impaired individual. Third, my webhost, GoDaddy.com, decided to “reclaim” my domain after I disputed an erroneous double charge that was made to my account. This third issue took almost six months to resolve, and I was forced to go to the Better Business Bureau to arbitrate the problem as GoDaddy.com was totally uncooperative with me during the numerous times I tried to resolve the billing issue prior to that.
That’s it for the short version. In any case, I made it here intact.