Theme Change - Again
As you can probably tell, there have been some changes made to the website. I’m using a slightly tweaked version of Graph Paper Design’s excellent Modularity Lite theme and spent most of the morning processing some photos for the slideshow above. (more…)
Theme Change
I’ve changed the site to use the excellent Statement theme from BlogOhBlog!; I intend to make a few changes to it (well, I already have, but there’s more to come). Let me know what you think so far in the comments below.
Some changes that remain to be made include figuring out how to get all my links to show up and how to get the categories/subcategories in a nested list, as they should be; additionally, I think I’ll use a little more space for the main entries and pare down the sidebar a little. The social networks at the top right need to be tweaked a little as well.
Thanks for your patience during the, er, renovations.
The Ides Of August Update
I’ve been kinda off-the-radar here lately due to a whole lotta life going on. As I mentioned previously, I’m quite involved with an outdoors club at school and due to some rather, er, abrupt changeover of the executive (of which I’m a part), it’s been taking up a lot of my free time. But that’s not really a bad thing, as it’s been a blast so far participating and organizing fun activities, as well as meeting tons of cool new people.
So let’s see now… what’s new?
Well, I guess the easiest to remember is… new gear!
You might notice that at the top right of this site there’s a funny little box called "My Zune Card", which links to my profile on the Zune Social. I bought an 80GB Microsoft Zune a little while back and I love it. It’s a really neat combination of a great hardware platform (the MP3 player itself), software platform (the Zune software has become my media player of choice) and social networking. Last.fm did a good job of this last facet, but integrating it with hardware as well as a marketplace (coming soon to Canada, available now in the US) takes it to the next logical level.
Having sold my old laptop (I’ll miss you, li’l buddy), I’ve replaced it with a Lenovo Thinkpad X61. It’s a tiny little thing, 12.1" screen, and built like a little tank. I’ve always loved ThinkPads for their ruggedness and reliability. It’s a fine machine, despite some problems I was having with wireless networking. I suspect the problem is due to the Access Connections Manager software that tries to manage your networking — specifically, it seems to have a little trouble dealing with DHCP. Having given the PC a fixed IP both in my router and in a custom Access Connections location profile, the link to my home network has been rock solid. I’ve had it about a week now and will give a full review at a later date.
Also, I’ve now set up a profile at Twitter. I’m not quite sure why. I think it’s one of those services that’s meant for people that are obsessive-compulsive about changing their Facebook status updates — which, in fact, I have linked to my ‘tweets’. I’m looking into setting up a little widget that will show that on this site as well; maybe Jaiku. Their account are currently by invite only, so we’ll see how that turns out. I’m also playing around with a new theme because, as much as I like this one, it’s a little too common around the net.
I’ve got some other news and reviews as well, but I’ll leave that for another post.
Upgrade to WP2.5.1 Complete
A security vulnerability has been disclosed in WordPress 2.5 and patched in Wordpress 2.5.1 — if you’re using WP for your blog, please upgrade it. The upgrade was pretty painless — but make sure that if you add the SECRET_KEY entry in your wp-config.php (and you should), that your secret key doesn’t include the apostrophe character (’) in it, or it’ll break stuff. I use the GRC Perfect Passwords page to generate my high-strength random passwords.
In other news, you can find rainbows pretty much anywhere (click to enlarge):
Workie Workie, Like a Jerkie
Just a quick update between finals for all two of you dedicated readers. Ever had one of those weeks where you’re absolutely certain that you have final A on Monday morning and final B on Wednesday afternoon, only to find out Sunday morning that you mixed the two up?
Yeah, it’s been great.
Also, per my earlier post, I’m finding that the WP Mobile Edition plugin is acting a little funny, so I’ve deactivated it. I don’t think this site gets much mobile traffic anyhow.
Otherwise, what’s new… let’s see, my butt is numb from studying, and I’ve ordered a new camera backpack which I’ll review promptly when it gets here.
And, for those that are here for my crappy photos, I updated my macrophotography gallery with a new image.
Some Props
During study breaks, I’ve been adding some functionality to the new site and I wanted to give credit where credit is due.
First, the theme I’m currently using is a slightly modified version of OneHertz’s Mandigo theme for WordPress. By ’slightly modified’, I mean that I adjusted a couple of things in the sidebar and footer. By complete coincidence, OneHertz is a web application and site design firm based in Montreal.
I’ve also added two WordPress plugins by Alex King, a web developer based in Denver. First is the ShareThis plugin, which you see at the bottom of every post/page on this site. Per the developer:
This plugin will allow your visitors to share your content via social bookmarking sites and/or e-mailing the post to a friend.
The second plugin by Alex King is called WP Mobile Edition, which allows PDA and Smartphone users to view a mobile-friendly version of the page. It should autodetect the mobile browser you’re using; it seems to work fine in Opera Mobile on my HTC Touch.
Finally, I really have to hand it to Microsoft for Windows Live Writer. It’s essentially a blogging tool for your computer, which seems to be handling WordPress just fine. In fact, everything but the absolute first post on this site, ‘Oops.‘, has been written and published in WLW — it even handles uploading pictures smoothly and effortlessly. Post drafts can be saved on your hard drive, or online. Windows Live has had some hit-or-miss apps, but WLW is definitely a bullseye.
That’s it for now. Back to studying for finals.
Oops.
Yeah, I did it again. I was getting annoyed with Joomla and just wiped the site. This will be the last time, probably.
