Entries Tagged 'wordpress' ↓

So here’s the new look!

What, you weren’t expecting a new look?

Well … it’s too late now, so you’d better like it.

I upgraded to WP2.1, which is fresh and clean, and figured I’d take the opportunity to move some things around. The plain ‘ol ahniwa.com url now points to what I admit is currently a very undeveloped portal page. And the blog has moved next door to its old home, now lurking at ahniwa.com/blog. I guess it’s true when they say that the only constant is change.

I hope you’ll forgive me for not posting an “actual” post. I’ve been sitting in front of this computer for too many hours already, staring at text, and I haven’t eaten since about one. On a sidenote, the new WP is named Ella, after Ella Fitzgerald. So that’s pretty neat.

Jeph has made promises of shirt availability. Shirts that say, “She blinded me with library science”.

Once again, Jeph Jacques is totally my hero.

You can see the shirt in action: here, here, and here.

Aside from the shirt, which is magnificent, what makes me feel ever warmer and fuzzier inside is that Jeph claims he has NEVER had as much demand for a shirt. Hellz yea, librarians represent!

Subscribers to my old "library" blog, The Dancing Librarian at exlibrius.org, may have noticed that I stopped posting to it, and that as of yesterday the feed title is now ahniwa.com.  I started to feel like having multiple sites to post about multiple topics was simply unmanageable, so I've moved EVERYTHING (including all my old blog entries from my old blogspot blog) over to this site.  One thing to maintain and tinker with, and it's got my name on it to boot.

You needn't change your feed subscription at all.  I've taken care of it for you.  Specifically, you'll receive feed of all the posts on ahniwa.com that would used to have been posted on The Dancing Librarian.  This will probably amount to most of the posts I write, though it may exclude some posts that I don't feel are pertinent (i.e. more personal posts).  If you'd like to subscribe to the whole shebang, point your aggregator over to http://feeds.feedburner.com/ahniwa and you'll be golden.

In either case, I'll continue to post stories and links to things I find interesting, mostly involving technology, webcomics, art & illustration, and other sundry and miscellaneous morsels.  Enjoy, and for the feed-readers, feel free to stop in on the site anytime and say hi, leave me a comment, and let me know that you're out there.  I'm maintaining this site for me, mostly, but it's always nice to know other people might enjoy it from time to time as well.

Cheers, Ahniwa

Picking a WordPress theme is like buying a car.  It feels like a big decision, and there are lots of shiny options available.  Themes, of course, are much less expensive than cars, but to date they've also been more difficult to find.  Most sites list themes by name, with little or no rating system and very few sorting options.  I found this to be less than a little helpful and more than a lot aggravating.  But that all changed on June 17th with the launch of the WP Theme Viewer.

Theme Viewer allows you to sort by any number of options, including number of columns, color, widget-readiness, width style, and even sidebar side-preference.  You are also shown a thumbnail of the theme, the number of times it's been downloaded, and the average rating.  The accompanying blog is handy for keeping up to date on changes, additions, and theme news.

Of course, if you're not that interested in searching and installing a theme yourself, updating to WordPress 2.0.3 offers fifty included themes, all washed and polished and ready to drive home today.  This theme was one of them, and I'm quite fond of it so far.

While I'm talking about WordPress:

The WordPress Widgets Blog has updates and downloads of the newest widgets that you didn't know you needed.

Archivist is a plugin that allows you to post a selected number of random archived posts on your front page. 

WP-Alexify pulls website thumbnails from Alexa.com and previews them when people scroll over your links. 

EditorMonkey is a huge plugin that replaces the default WordPress text editor with a TinyMCE or FCKeditor WYSIWYG editor.  It integrates spellcheck as well as find/replace and advanced link options, and is very customizable.  (Evidently WordPress 2.1 will incorporate spellcheck as well, but why wait?)

The Feedburner Feed Replacement plugin allows you to route your RSS feed into Feedburner, which gives you many more options regarding your feed, as well as keeping track of feed statistics and making your feed universally readable.  Note that while this plugin streamlines the process a bit that it isn't strictly necessary for setting up your WP blog with Feedburner.  If you do end up using the Feedburner service, you should probably update your feeds autodiscovery links, as described here.

Google Sitemaps creates a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog.

Last but not least, Ultimate Tag Warrior, which has been around forever and may be the most well known plugin (after Akismet), lets you tag the holy hell out of your posts, and gives you plenty of options for how to display those tags (or not, as the case may be).

I may be a little plugin happy, I admit, but those are the ones I use and I love them all.  I'm also planning on adding a "nicer archives" plugin, once I can find one that says it works in WordPress 2.0+, and I'd like a stat tracker as well.  If you have suggestions for either, please do tell.

I was a bit confused if the Wordpress dev blog was playing an April Fool’s joke with their announcement of “Wordpattern”. Having read it over, I’m fairly convinced it’s a joke, but should note that I can tend to be unfortunately gullible, at times. In any case, here are some items of humor I came across while researching this “hoax(?)”.

Our groundbreaking, no-nonsense approach of creating a fast and lean CMSMS (CMS management system) is unparalleled and will fulfill the need of every user out there – we won’t be content with anything less.

A “Content Management Software Management System”? Awesome.

The Wordpattern features page has some choice tidbits:

4 Minute Install

The latest InstallMark™ benchmarks clock the WordPattern install process in at 3:47 – that’s a 25% improvement over WordPress 2.0, and a whopping 41% faster than Textpattern.

Gidgets

Like widgets, only cuter.

I think this marks the first time a web application benchmarked its install speed. I also like BJAX, Web2.1 (beta), and invisible URLs. The roadmap section is not to be missed, detailing Wordpattern’s “5 milestones” (the 5th being World Domination). I like the idea of “Tiger Teams”, as well as the Marketing and Evangelism Team. Also linked from the roadmap is Huhcorp, who they’re evidently working with. Their page is hilarious as well.

Our name will confuse you, but, you have to admit, the logo design is pretty cool. And we’re good at turning regular words into “e-words,” such as “e-consulting,” “e-business” or “e-sexual harassment.”

Our office is really modern and we’ve got nice computers and stuff. If you ever saw it, you’d say “Wow, cool office. These guys are legit.”

Following more links, to Huhcorp’s “ideas” page:

Our female staff members are all hot, so, even if there’s nothing to meet about, we’ll sit and flirt with them, and charge you for the time. When one of our new-age marketing gurus or design experts or consultants has an idea, the rest of us look at him or her with serious expressions and write stuff down on paper.

I’m really temped to quote their entire site, because I find it all completely awesome, but you should just go and check it out for yourself. The coup de grace of this Wordpattern Masquerade is on the legal page, where one finds the following:

The Fine Print

All content, code, images, sounds, smells, ambience and the warm fuzzy feeling you get while basking in our glow are Copyright (Q) 1972-1976 The WordPattern Concern. WordPattern™, the WordPattern Logo™, the letters W™ and P™, the colours white™ and black™, and the non-breaking space™ are registered trademarks. The WordPattern Concern does not represent the accuracy or reliability of the information on these so-called “web pages”, after all you can’t believe anything you read on the internets these days.

Things like this make April Fool’s Day worthwhile. But on a more serious bent, why don’t companies make their “serious” web pages this interesting? Would I want to use a company like Huh? for marketing by looking at their website? Maybe, and maybe not, but they would certainly stand out from the crowd, and that’s never a bad thing. Offering serious and quality information about your product is a good thing, certainly, but it can be oh so dull. I would love to see companies manage to fit factual aspects into entertaining text. I mean, when was the last time you READ through the entirety of a corporation’s site because it was entertaining? Yeah, me neither. If we’re going to start talking about aspects of Web 2.1 (beta), I think a defining feature should be humor.

** Mention of “Wordpattern” dates back awhile, at least to January 2005. It appears the original coinage of “Wordpattern” (and Textpress) belong to Jina Bolton, though her post is lost to everything but Google’s cached pages. Her post was in response to this post on Joshuaink. Here’s Google’s cached version (2nd post down) if you’d like to read it. There, I’ve done my snooping for the day.