Blargh. I just finished the redesign of the site and the WordPress team goes and releases 3.0! What bastards! Why did they have to include all kinds of awesome features, like:

• custom backgrounds and headers
• shortlinks
• menus (no more file editing)
• post types
• taxonomies
• long-awaited merge of MU and WordPress

It also includes a new default theme called Twenty Ten. It looks pretty sexy.

Hopefully I’ll get to upgrade everything soon.

Please excuse the construction. I’m redesigning the WordPress theme for the site. HTML5-y goodness!

Being home from school and not having started my job yet, I find myself with a lot of time on my hands. Obviously this is something that I definitely didn’t have while at school; projects, homework, female-obligations (Hey, I’m not complaining!). You get the idea. But since I’ve been home I’ve started playing around with WordPress, my blog software. I found that it has some pretty spiffy features…

Plugins: Now, WordPress is notorious for it’s plugin support, and this isn’t news to me. I’ve had several different plugins installed from day 1, but I’ve recently found some cool new ones. Particularly akismet, a spam control plugin, Counterize, a stats plugin, and most of all, Widgets. Wigets are pretty sweet, more on that later.

Akismet is a pretty big plugin to control spam in the comments. I’ve been getting a lot of bot-spam on the site lately. Some days, I would get 2 or 3 notifications about comments posted to the site. Invariably, I knew they were all spam, but I would have to visit the site to delete them. Bummer. While akismet is included with the WordPress install, I never activated it. I’m glad I did though. It has caught everything so far.

Counterize is a tiny plugin which keeps track of visitor statistics. You know… hits, pages viewed and referrers. The usual stuff. I had tried to get an AWStats plugin working, but because of the way this host is setup, I couldn’t get it working. Oh well… I like Counterize because it incorporates with WordPress very nicely, and I can see all the site stats from the Admin panel.

Widgets: These things are really cool. By recoding my sidebar slightly, and enabling the Widgets, I can now move the sidebar sections around super-easy. There is an interface in the admin panel which lets me drag-and-drop the sections where ever I want. I can also modify their contents on the fly, add new sections and incorporate cool WordPress features I didn’t know existed.

Needless to say, I’ve been making slight improvements to the site over the past few days. I also created a “Projects” section. This will be home to information about the Java projects I have worked on for class. They were pretty big, so I want to be able to document them online.

While I’m sitting here bored at work, I’ve been dutifully working on my website. I recently noticed, after the addition of the new Gallery2 photo gallery, that the site design was rather narrow. To remedy this, I have horizontally expanded the site to fill a standard browser maximized at 800×600 screen resolution. While I know some might argue for the use of dynamic layouts as opposed to static ones, I find that I have enough content to fill a browser window when maximized on 1024×768, but the site just looks bare at 1280×1024.

I will also develop a few new header images, which will be larger, to offset the expanded width of the screen. While browsing around the internet, I notice blogs usually have oversized header images which fill a majority of the screen. I don’t want to feel out of place, so I’ll orchestrate a cocoughany of larger images to fill the newly voided space at the top of the site.

P.S. I just heard the awesomest ringtone ever!! Some lowly paper-jockey came in today to help file, and his phone rang… Super Mario Brothers theme. It was friggin’ sweet! That just made my day.

Yeah, I’ve been playing around with a few WordPress plug-ins lately. I found some interesting ones, especially the myMooMus mood plug-in. It adds a mood entry to my posts. It’s uber fun.

What I’ve really been looking for is a gallery plug-in. I found a few that add images to blog posts, but I want on that will manage images on blog pages. Hmmm…. Nothing specific yet, but I did find one to use with Gallery2

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.0. Don’t know why I did, it’s not like the old WordPress (1.5.1) was giving me problems… I just felt like making everything joyous for the new year.

Oh yeah. I also paid for ad removal from my host, so I’ll be taking down the ads pretty soon. I also get moved to a better server, where there (hopefully) won’t be any downtime. I’m thinking about buying a domain too… We’ll see.