I’ve made changes to the blog. Again. Of course, that’s the point, right?

The big deal is that I’ve given in to the reality that my blog is my web site and my web site is my blog. I have therefore upgraded to the latest version of WordPress by creating an entirely new blog at the root level of my web site and importing all the old content into it. Anyone who pings www.billkubeck.com will now go right to the blog.

This makes sense for two closely-related reasons. First, my web site has no reason to exist beyond hosting my blog. Second, I never really wanted just a blog, I wanted a dynamic web site. Well, WordPress isn’t just blog software, it’s a damn fine Content Management System. By putting a WordPress blog in place as my web site, I get all I wanted. How cool is that?

I’m still rethinking everything, so there will be more changes. Promise.

-= Gryphon =-

Powered by Zoundry

I say “sort of” because I had to install a new untouched copy of the theme that I just got from the author’s site. It works, but all customizations are gone. Foo.

I still don’t know what broke in the old one.

-= Gryphon =-

Technorati : WordPress, theme

I haven’t figured out what went wrong with the theme. I tried uploading a backup and that didn’t help.

I’m taking this as a sign that I need to do some major work on the blog. The version of WordPress I’m running is now way out of date. I had been putting off upgrading because it’s a rather tedious chore. Well, here’s my excuse. I’ve made backups of the entire billkubeck.com site and downloaded the latest version of WordPress. The next step will be to install the new WordPress and rebuild the theme. We’ll see how that goes.

-= Gryphon =-

Technorati : WordPress

I haven’t done much with the blog in quite a while, and I was shocked when I took a look two days ago. It was gone! Well, the content was gone. The page layout and headers were there, but the posts and pages had vanished.

A little detective work and experimentation revealed that the content was all still there, but that the template was broken somehow and wouldn’t display any of it. Switching to another template brought everything back.

My next task is to put back a fresh copy of the original theme. It was my favorite by a large margin and I had modified it to suit my needs.

At least I know I have a local copy. I have a habit of editing the theme locally and then uploading the changed files. I could edit directly by ftp, but that doesn’t leave backups on my local machine.

I have no idea what went wrong here. My first (non-technical) thought was that my site is feeling neglected and is starting to fire warning shots. I plan to give it some TLC before it vanishes completely

-= Gryphon =-

I have taken the plunge and upgraded my hosting to the new 2.0 configuration offered by GoDaddy. I was motivated to do this because I wanted to experiment a little with sub domains, and the new configuration offers considerably more power and flexibility there.

Since the upgrade seems to have worked, you can now get straight to my blog with the URL http://gryphon20.billkubeck.com . This actually maps to www.billkubeck.com/blogs/gryphon20/ , but it’s simpler and more obvious. I like it.

Next on the task list: upgrading WordPress from version 2.03 to version 2.05. I hope to get that done soon.

-= Gryphon =-

Technorati : GoDaddy, Internet, WordPress, web hosting

One design concept I stubbornly stick with is that a site should look okay at 800×600 screen resolution. I do this because I believe that there are still quite a few people who browse at that resolution. Who? Me, for one. While my desktop system sports 1024×768 resolution, my antique HP laptop can’t manage better than 800×600. The display just won’t do enough dots per inch to get more than that on the screen. I suspect that there are lots of folks out there with similar issues.

I also suspect there are lots of folks out there like me who do not run a system at the highest resolution it will support. My desktop system will cheerfully go as high as 1600×1200 at 100Hz refresh. My middle-aged eyeballs, however, will not. I have found the balance of comfort and content at 1024×768 on my 19″ monitor.

So, no matter what else I may do, I try to make sure that Gryphon 2.0 Beta looks decent at 800×600. Which finally leads to the tweak of the day…. I reduced the width of the header image so the tagline didn’t wrap at that resolution. That will do until I get the proper image of a gryphon to put there.

-= Gryphon =-

Technorati : CSS, WordPress, theme, web design

After a brief flurry of mucking about, I picked a theme that had the structure I wanted and I am tweaking that now. The one I’m using now is “In Business,” by Kaushal Sheth. This is a theme by the same author who did “Blue Horizon,” which is the theme that Folkcat chose as the foundation for her blog. I guess we have similar tastes.

In any case, I have chosen a theme as the foundation for Gryphon 2.0 and I will be modifying that from now on.

-= Gryphon =-

Technorati : WordPress, theme

I am understanding this theme better and I am understanding WordPress better. I have figured out how to combine static and dynamic content in the sidebar, and I have gotten a better understanding of how PHP works overall.

I may figure this out yet

-= G =-

So much for the theory that I was getting close to choosing a theme. I was refining Stucco last last and started to struggle with converting it from fixed-width columns to fluid-width columns. My grasp of CSS isn’t good enough yet to make that happen without a fair amount of work. At least the results I was getting were not quite what I wanted.

I decided to go back to the theme vaults at WordPress and find some fluid-width themes to start from. I tried out a few and settled on two to tinker with. Perhaps by studying those themes, I can make Stucco work the way I want it to. If not, I have a couple of themes to bash into a shape I like.

-= G =-

Technorati : CSS, WordPress, theme

I really like Opera better than FireFox, but one feature keeps me using Firefox: the Foxmarks bookmark synchronizer. Every time I open Firefox, the bookmarks on that system are synchronized to the set on the Foxmarks server. I browse and bookmark from two different systems, but I want one consistent set of bookmarks on both. Foxmarks gives me that.

Now that Opera supports widgets/extensions, I want this feature. I haven’t found it yet, but I’m looking.

-= G =-

Technorati : Opera web browser, bookmarks, browser extension, browser widget