Tagged: Wordpress

Still around


I was shocked to see how infrequently I’ve blogged since the [[http://floatingsun.net/blog/archives/|beginning of 2007]]. Maybe its good in a way — I had enough things to keep me busy in my real life that I didn’t have too much time for my online self. The past few weeks I was swamped with some paper deadlines. Now that those are done, I’m trying to catch up with the rest of my life, and eventually got around to poking with my blog again. A lot of other things have happened in the meantime and I’ll try to gradually cover them in subsequent posts.

Meanwhile, I have started hacking together my own theme on top of [[http://getk2.com|K2]]. Right now I’m maintaining it has a set of [[http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/|Mercurial]] [[http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/MqExtension|mq]] patches on top of the SVN-trunk of K2. So far its working out alright, we’ll see how it goes moving forward. The only major changes I’ve made so far are the new [[http://floatingsun.net/blog|Home]] page and some typographical tweaks. The Home page has two columns, and they support [[http://widgets.wordpress.com|widgets]] and K2 modules — so you can pretty much put arbitrary content in the columns. I also whipped up my own text widget, which would apply the content filters to the text — the default text widget outputs raw text, which I didn’t like. I want to be able to use my [[http://floatingsun.net/blog/code/wp-dokuwiki/|WP-Dokuwiki]] plugin wherever possible.

I’m still trying to figure out fonts and color schemes. I’m so bad at color schemes, really! I’m really digging Adobe’s new online tool though — [[http://kuler.adobe.com|Kuler]]. I’ll also beg/borrow/steal the features I like from some of the other really neat WordPress themes out there, like [[http://cutline.tubetorial.com|Cutline]], [[http://squible.com|Squible]], [[http://deanjrobinson.com|Redoable]] etc.

Finally, I know that I’m probably spending too much time unnecessarily on the look and feel of the blog. I’m not really a designer, so this is my attempt to fool myself into believing that I can atleast try. But I will start focusing on content very soon now.

Winds of change


If you’ve been kind enough to visit my blog a couple of times today you would have noticed that I’ve been playing around (a bit too much perhaps) with the look, plugins and such around here. Yes my friends, change is upon us yet again. I’ve just upgraded to WordPress 2.1 and I was getting bored with K2. So I’ve been looking around for some interesting WordPress themes. Right now I’m using Cutline, which is pretty pretty but there are some little things I don’t like yet. So bear with me while I try to figure things out over the next couple of days. Stay tuned!

Live from Wordcamp


I’m at [[http://2006.wordcamp.org|Wordcamp]] over at the [[http://swedishamericanhall.com|Swedish American Hall]] here in San Francisco. I’ll try to keep this post updated as I go along, but I’m not planning on staying the whole time. But you can surely find tons of information about it (search tag ‘wordcamp’)

* **Widgets Showcase**: I was surprised that so many people in the audience knew so little about Widgets. Clearly they’re not as popular as I thought. I guess a lot of people are hesitant in experimenting with the structure of their blogs (//if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it//). The [[http://rawsugar.com|Raw Sugar]] folks grabbed a fair amount of time in the 1-hr slot and a guy from [[http://goodstorm.com|Good Storm]] talked briefly about their widget. It was also surprising to see that only about 2-3 people in the room had written a widget! I was one of them, but since my widgets are trivially simple, I really didn’t feel like “show-casing” them :) For people who are interested in my widgets, head over to Code -> WordPress Widgets on the menu above.
* **Blog Promotion**: This one started out real bad. I thought it would be heading nowhere. But eventually this //Prince Campbell// dude got the audience going — it was a very interactive, lively discussion. Interestingly though, the discussion diverged from “how to make a blog popular” to “what IS a blog”. People were talking about how Flickr and YouTube can be viewed as blogs and whether having a lot of comments is a pre-requisite for a blog. I don’t know about others, but the following things really stand out for me: passion, attention to detail and a good sense of humor. And I think people missed the point that not all blogs //need// to be compelling. I mean, my blog probably ain’t compelling to very many. But I don’t want it to be, I don’t need it to be. I blog because I want to. For people who make a living out of blogging, this might be an issue. At some point people were discussing whether getting into traditional media helps. Sure, it may help a bit, but I doubt its a driving factor. I mean, how many newspapers have talked about Scoble?
* **State of the Word**: This one was pretty cool. I think Matt did a great job talking and listening to people. The session quickly morphed into “Whats wrong with WordPress” or “How could WP be improved” with most of the discussion being driven by the audience. I’m sure there are people who took detailed notes for this session, so I’ll just throw out some of the stuff I remember:
* Continue on making installation a breeze
* Really focus on making upgrades easier/painless
* Improve documentation. Richer documentation — screencasts, videos, audios — that kind of stuff
* Central directory for themes and plugins
* Directory of paid services and consultants
* Make theme customization easier
* Organize/improve the codex
* …

I’m actually planning to leave shortly after lunch since I have to go to the Santana concert in the evening and I want to catch some sleep before that. Unfortunately all of the //really// good talks that I was interested in are in the afternoon (Om Malik is talking, there is a talk about Blog Architecture and one about High Performance WordPress) so it’ll be a shame that I’ll miss them :-( But hopefully others will cover these talks in some detail.

Two WordPress Widgets


As you can see, I’ve moved back to [[http://getk2.com|K2]] and I’m actually running off of [[http://code.google.com/p/kaytwo/source|the SVN sources]]. So I started checking out [[http://automattic.com/code/widgets/|Wordpress Widgets]] and found myself needing a [[http://floatingsun.net/blog/code/wordpress-widgets/|couple of my own]]. So here they are — perhaps some of you will find them useful:

* [[http://floatingsun.net/blog/code/utw-related-posts.php|UTW Related Posts Widget]]
* [[http://floatingsun.net/blog/code/subpages.php|Subpages Widget]]