Posts Tagged ‘WordPress’

Mondochrome.ca (again)

Saturday, July 19th, 2008

I finally went through the trouble and got my photoblog up and going again.  Sort of.  It’s working, but I’ve only put up like 5 pictures so far.

But what a pain I’ve been having with Yahoo and WordPress.  Back in the day when I started this domain I chose Yahoo as my host specifically because they were recommended on the WordPress.org site.  But things have changed.  With the newer versions of WordPress not working with the restrictions Yahoo puts on accounts I’m seriously thinking about changing hosts.  The big thing is the Permalink settings.  The link for this post is:

http://wayne.mondochrome.ca/2008/07/19/mondochromeca-again

But of course, there’s no folder specially for 2008, nor 07 or even 19, it’s dynamically generated through software and magic.  Because this installation of WordPress was initially installed by Yahoo way back at the beginning of time it has what is technically referred to as “special sauce” that makes it work with the restrictions on Yahoo accounts.

What that is, I have no idea, nor have I been able to figure it out.  But upgrade after upgrade seem to work just fine.

The photoblog isn’t so lucky.  I went with a fresh install of the latests WordPress (2.6) since I think Yahoo still installs something in the 2.0.x range and progress marches forward! But now the fancy Permalinks which makes everything look so clean and organized to Google don’t work.

http://www.mondochrome.ca/?p=15

Ugh.  It’s not the end of the world, but I am paying for this, right?  If I’m going to spend money on it, I might has well get what I want.

For the most part, the photoblog is finished.  All I need to really do is add content.  I also want to fix up the about page and maybe ad a listing of all my gear.  I really like the Linquist theme, it’s only missing tags.  Categories can all be added to a dedicated page (once I figure that out) but I’m trying to tag everything properly right down to the shutter speed and F-stop for each photo and I’d like that to be a little more accessible.

But it’s a good enough start for now.

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Monotone for Mondochrome?

Saturday, April 26th, 2008

My photoblog has been MIA for a while now. I’ve been meaning to research different photoblog platforms and it all seems like so much trouble.

I don’t have much design skill to begin with and I loath all forms of HTML so I’m really dependent on what themes are available. WordPress photoblog themes that I’ve seen are either not updated to keep up with the newer tech added into the WordPress core or require plugins which aren’t guarrenteed to work with everything else. Plus WordPress usually needs to be tweaked to function right.

Too much trouble.

WordPress released a specific photoblog theme today. And so far I like the look of it. The biggest plus is that you know Automattic wouldn’t release it if it wasn’t ready.

Just a few questions are left. Do I want the same theme as just-about-every-photoblog will soon have? And, where the hell do you actually download it? Is this a WordPress.com exclusive?

Edit: Doh!  Available next week….

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Wayne’s World

Friday, February 15th, 2008

I stumbled across the concept of a lifestream and I’ve been trying to set one up on this blog.  After a few not-ready-for-prime-time plugins (plus there’s a chance my WordPress is messed up somehow) I was getting nothing.

But I found Escaloop tonight and it does all the heavy lifting for me, I just need to create a page to call it.  It’s obviously the easiest of everything I’ve tried but it’s also the one that comes closest to what I wanted.  The only downside is that it’s all compiled on the Escaloop server for me.  I’d really prefer a real WordPress plugin, but I’ll wait till they’re hammered out a little more.

So the page is up, let’s see what happens.

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Hey, wayner!

Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007

I switched the site theme again. I’ve temporarily settled on the Tarski theme. It’s clean and easily configurable. I want to edit html and php as little as possible!

I attempted to redo everything right down to the blog title. I’ve ape’d the logo and name of flickr as a way of emphasizing my desire to focus on photography. Of course, because of that, I follow with a sketch. ;)

I’m still going to search out other themes to see if there’s anything else that might appeal to me more. Who knows where I’ll end up yet.

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Auto-Update to 2.3

Wednesday, September 26th, 2007

I upgraded the site to WordPress 2.3 this evening. I’ve been putting off updates because, quite frankly, it scared the hell out of me. One of the reasons I picked Yahoo for my hosting was, besides being big enough I felt I could trust it to just work, that it had a auto-installer for WordPress. At the time I was under the impression that Yahoo would also keep the installation updated. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

I recently found out about a plugin which does the WordPress update for you. Which, in my opinion, should be built into future versions of WordPress. In fact, I think it would be a good idea of the plugin’s could be updated from within WordPress system as well.

Everything worked well but I got some nasty looking error messages when it tried to update the database. Everything works tho, so I’m happy.

Now, the plan is to get a new theme for the site. The newer versions of WordPress support a dynamic sidebar and it’s a lot easier to change around. But the theme has to support it. I should be able to edit the current one but that’s a little too much effort for me. :-)

I’ve searched through 20 pages of theme’s and these are the ones I like so far:

They all follow the same sort of look, which is also similar to the current theme. I’d like to customize the theme to make it “my own”, but I pretty much just want to change the picture files. I’ll have to test these out when I get some time.

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