Now if themes were that easy…

To install the theme you simply move the theme zip file into your $WPHOME/themes directory and unzip it (may need to change permissions depending on your setup). All that’s left is to select the theme using the administration pages.

I liked the new theme, as I was getting tired of the orange on black thin column page, so I made a few changes to the widgets that were visible in my sidebar and let it rip.

I don’t know why installing themes via an install button through the administration pages and the themes site is not available. From an OS perspective, if you can do one you should be able to do the other since you’re just writing files to a directory somewhere under the $WPHOME directory (if the web server has write permissions to the $WPHOME directory (which is required for installing plugins/widgets via the administration pages)).

After I let the new theme soak, I made the following customizations the template:

• I had to make one change because I was pretty anal. I had to modify the sidebar.php file. I did that just because like I said, I’m anal. I basically removed the Archive and Category entries as I would rather have the widget style of those items.
• I added a redirect.php page for an automatic redirect from a page (using a page as a link) so I could link to my personal web pages.
• I updated the header image with a picture I took in Alaska around 5am of the eastern ridge of the Alaska Range. We were leaving the back county in Denali National Park when I took the picture.
• I updated the header color scheme in style.css to change the color of the text.
• Lastly, I modified the end.php file to add a timer_stop entry to indicate how long my server (currently an old Dell Laptop I got for $250) took to generate the page. When I added this line, I also had to edit style.css and change the top margin in the footer.
• I updated the 404.css and 404.php files as the default files that came with the template were bunk.

Pictures

I just happened to notice that all the photographs on my website were missing.

Apparently this is a known bug in Firefox 3.0+. I don’t advocate it, but use IE or Safari (or Opera or something other than firefox) if you want to see the photos.

Big house

Finally getting around to updating the site. I’ve installed iLife’08 so there may be some different behaviors and I’m getting around to figuring all of those out. I think overall iLife’08 is a nice improvement. iMovie seems a major improvement, but it did take me a bit to get used to the new features and I am a little annoyed at so many missing features that may still be present, but are much harder to find. With that said, I did create a nice youtube video of me cooking a brisket on my new Big Green Egg and it didn’t even take me that long to break down an hour or so of video into a 3 minute youtube. Likewise iPhoto has some major improvements, but I’m still using Aperture for most of my photography. This is my first foray into iWeb and I haven’t noticed too many differences, with the exception to the photo albums, and I’m not sure how they will export to my site (as opposed to .mac, more on that later).

So, what have I been up to. I got a Big Green Egg from my parents as a very early Christmas present as my gas grill was on it’s last legs. I dig the BGE. It’s fast to get up to heat to sear (faster than my gas grill), does low and slow smoking, does “modified” indirect grilling, and some people even make bread and pizza in it like a brick oven.

Oh, I also got a job (finally). I start next monday with Design Nine, Inc. as a Broadband Planner. I’m pretty excited about the prospects. It’s a tiny company still in startup mode and I think it has a chance for some significant growth which hopefully will translate as growth for me as well.

As far as changes to the site, I’ve added a Maine 2007 photo album, updated the Dog’s album with some nice recent shots of all 3 dogs, updated all the pages to iWeb’08, and added some links to make things more integrated internally as well as link to external sites.

Color hat

It was hot today. I worked out in the garden until it got too hot to continue. I will take some pictures and post my garden later this summer as it shapes up.

This afternoon I was bored and started playing in Adobe Photoshop. I’ve decided to create a photo album dedicated to Photoshop. I haven’t used it much beyond the standard cropping and some color image adjustment, but I would like to play around in it more and learn some of the cool features. My initial series is just a series of hats (like the one above). I’m not sure what else I want to do, but I’m sure that it will come to me eventually. My thoughts are that if I want to do some fun editing in Photoshop, I first need to start taking pictures that will be fun to edit. I browsed through a lot of my photos and nothing really jumped out at me as something that would be fun to edit and colorize. I do have one from Amsterdam of a bunch of eggs at the market. I started to colorize each egg differently and realized that it just looked like a display of easter eggs, so I ditched my effort.

If you didn’t notice it above, here is the link to the Photoshop album.

More later……

Chilis on the grill

I created a page for our pictures from Amsterdam and while I was at it, I added photos to the random and dog pages as well.

Puppy

Rome

NOLS and other

Random and other neat pictures

Of course, you can always start at the main photos link to see the Alaska pictures.

Please use the comments fields here or just send me an e-mail and let me know if there is some changes you would recommend or additions you would like to see (I’ve got a ton more pictures that I need to continue to post.

Eagle drying himself

I finally got around to posting more Alaska photos.  I’ll be posting other albums later this week (like new puppy pictures).

Enjoy the photos.