I poked around on the WordPress themes site for a while and ended up choosing iNove which was on the first page (due to it’s popularity). I’m continually impressed by WordPress 2.7. The administration pages are dynamic yet simple and the capabilities of installing plugins/widgets remotely is very slick. It’s nice to be able to install a widget, test it with a blog or page post, and then just nix it if you aren’t pleased. It’s so easy and fast that I keep finding widgets I want to install just to mess with them and doing so.
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.
Tag: Wordpress
I was messing around in WordPress and adding widgets this week. Adding widgets with WordPress 2.7 is a breeze and I can do it remotely using the wp-admin features. I didn’t noticed that widgets could be installed remotely from the admin tools and was adding them manually. Once I learned that I can install them directly from the admin pages, I added a more.
I added a SEO widget even though it’s probably useless for this blog. It was fun to add and I’ll see if it makes a difference.
I added WordPress Popular Posts which is why on the index (or main) page you see the posts that are visited most often.
So the weather sucked and I didn’t feel like playing any online games today. I decided to do some updates, upgrades, and play around for a bit.
The first order of business was to update my Mac and iPhone and they were pretty easy and benign (and the latest iPhone upgrade rocks). I applied all the updates to several Windoze computers or Virtual Machines, and performed all the updates for the various flavors of Linux running around the house. No problems with the basic updates. Everything went as planned.
Comcast
I’m not sure when this started happening, but I can’t seem to isolate the problem and I’m assuming that Comcast is to blame. I’m running this blog on a PC in my house connected to the interWeb via Comcast residential high speed Internet. I’m keeping DNS humming along using DynDNS even though my “dynamic” IP address (via DHCP) has not changed since the Adelphia to Comcast migration (and hadn’t changed on Adelphia prior to that migration). Even before I was running this blog, I had a wiki using MediaWiki running (it still is).
Here’s what’s happening….I can add a comment or a new wiki page (which is an HTTP POST transaction) from home or remotely (outside of my LAN). However, I’m limited to the size of my comments (or wiki pages) when I’m remote (outside of my LAN). Once I get more than a paragraph or so in a comment (or a wiki page) and hit “send” my browser just hangs. Incidentally, this also happens when creating a blog post while logged in to WordPress.
Wordpress
So, I decided that I would move my blog from iWeb to WordPress. One of the reasons I decided to do this is it will give me the capability of hosting more blogs and even doing content based blogging. I also was dumping my iWeb folder onto my Ubuntu box and therefore didn’t have the ability to allow comments on my blog. I will still keep my personal Web site based on iWeb (at least for now), and will work on integrating them together if at all possible.
I installed WordPress on my Ubuntu Hardy (8.04 LTS) installation. I initially used the package from the ubuntu repositories (apt-get) but after my initial spin, I decided to go with the most recent tarball from WordPress itself. Installation was a breeze and consisted of:
- unpacking the tarball (tar -xvf filename)
- changing the ownership of the wordpress directory to allow the Apache user write privileges (chown -R user:group wordpress)
- creating a wordpress user and database in phpMyAdmin
- browsing to the wordpress directory
