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More blog programming

I’m playing with the newest release of the Kubrick theme, K2, which is in an early alpha.

It doesn’t work in Internet Explorer correctly on Windows XP (the right hand sidebar is off significantly), but I really don’t care anymore. I’m sick of tinkering with themes because IE doesn’t render CSS properly.

If you are still using IE (and why are you?) please switch to Mozilla’s Firefox.

I’m going to leave the default colors up for now, maybe tinker with the sidebar, and when it’s final, I’ll apply a black style / CSS (maybe from the old theme by neuro).

Blog Fixed & Flickr Update

Seems since I did the security update late last week, that one of the fixes changed the permissions on the file that controls the comments, so it errored out and wasn’t accepting comments.

That’s now fixed. For the record, the error was:

Warning: comments_template (wp-content/themes/default/comments.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in (wp-includes/comment-functions.php on line 28)

According to the to the fix on the WordPress Codex it required adding a line to the style.css sheet of a theme so it looked like:

/*<br /> Template: mad1<br /> Theme Name: No Named Art Seed

However, that didn’t work for me.

SSH’ing in, and going to my wp-content directory and typing:

chmod -R 755 themes/ however did work. I don’t know if it’s a permission error on the comments file itself, or the directories, but comments are back.

In related news, I’ve come across some of last years digital photo’s and am in the process of uploading them to Flickr, including the ones from Packer Training Camp last year. So some of the timelines will be out of date for a few days, as I upload them and I’ll finish ’em off with this past weekends Fourth of July photo’s to back in to real-time.

My favorite Packer photo is Robert Ferguson making a spectacular one-handed catch at full extension in the air:

dsc00120

More theme stuff

I came across a new theme yesterday, Relaxation, that adds a 3rd row as a Flickr badge of your latest photo’s.

I’ve decided to give up IE compatibility, and focus on Firefox. This theme, as well as a number of others I’ve played with, works fine in Firefox (go go standards) but not in IE.

I’m traveling later in the week, and getting a new laptop as well. Memorial Day I’ll be home in Wisconsin, and plan on coding the new theme’s CSS then.

Playing with a new theme

The WordPress Themes Competition winners have been announced. I’m torn to what theme I want to use.

I’m testing the equix theme, which I like as a light colored theme, though I’m still debating about going back to a dark theme. I don’t like the mouse cursor, and I don’t know why it doesn’t render correct in IE (damn work forcing my browser choice). It works fine in Firefox. I like it’s clean look though.

…Must learn more HTML, PHP and CSS.

Update 6:00 p.m.: Cursor fixed, thank god

Still slacking

Can you tell I’ve been busy at work? No blog updates, which I usually do first thing in the morning, I need to get better at doing them at night.

I still haven’t hacked at the blog, I’m waiting to see what the outcome of the current WordPress Theme Competition may yield as themes go.

I generally like the dark colors as it is now, but one column isn’t cutting it – I need to add back the second column for links and stuff. So I’ll wait a month before updating it again. So far, I’m very happy with WordPress 1.5. The developers did a helluva job with the latest version. After one hiccup, the spaminator is killing all the comment spam, the interface is awesome, and I really dig the Dashboard feature.

Updated, again!

WordPress 1.5 is officially out, so it’s a good thing I I downloaded a nightly build a week ago to play with it. I’ve updated the site accordingly, and downloaded a few themes to play with as well.

I like the black, but spent two hours playing with the header graphic in GIMP, and didn’t really get anywhere. I’m going to leave the black theme up for now to see how I really feel about it. If I like it, I’m going to heavily modify it, including adding the links & meta back, probably adding a second column for that stuff, and seeing what I can do with the header graphic.

Upgrade Complete

I’ve upgraded the blog to WordPress 1.5 gamma. Used last night’s nightly build, and everything seems to work. There’s a few bugs in the admin section, but they’re just visual.

I’ll have to mess with the visual settings a little bit, the categories tree structure has been replaced by an alphabetical list which I don’t care for. Oddly enough, in the admin section it’s still in the tree form. Oh well.

Changed the theme. Was using Kubrick for WordPress 1.2 – and they made that the standard theme in 1.5! That just won’t do. So I downloaded ShadedGrey from WP-Themes.info.

Will have to play around with it a bit more, but so far so good.

Comment Spam

The Comment Spam I’m getting is out of control. I mention the word “poker” in a post Friday, and I’ve had spam sites try to add over 500 comments in the last 48 hours. I’ve tweaked the site a bit, and even before that, I’ve been lucky enough that none of the comment spam has gotten through yet.

It’s quite annoying to have it all sit in the moderation queue though. Rumor is WordPress 1.3 will be out soonish. I’m hoping it has built-in spam comment control, otherwise it’s time to start looking at some plugins.

How annoying.