On More WordPress Tweaking

Sometime next week, WordPress 2.5 is supposed to drop.

Being the compulsive tinkerer that I am, will I upgrade that day?

Is the sky blue?

The upgrade to WP 2.1 was a pain in the ass. Things broke. Like my sidebar.

The 2.2 upgrade wasn’t an issue. And going to WordPress 2.3 was a matter of uploading files and making a few template modifications.

I don’t know, really, what’s new with 2.5, beyond a completely different backend interface. I’ve heard horror stories that it’s been taken out back and beaten with the fugly stick. It’s entirely possible that I won’t like it. Who knows? Maybe if it is that hideous, I’ll start blogging with Flock on a regular basis.

And to be honest, I have some concerns with the layout I’m using. Hemingway was written for a different era of WordPress, and while I’ve no doubt that if there’s some coding issue I’ll be able to figure it out, puzzling out the code that’s not working right isn’t exactly fun and games.

Yet I’m not worried about things like losing the tag list code I cobbled together last week; I pulled it out of my modified categories-template.php file and put it into its own Sidebar Tag Plugin instead.

See? This is why I use WordPress. Because I have to tinker. Code, it’s like LEGOs. Only without the colors. 🙂

Stayed tuned for next week’s software upgrade. And keep your fingers crossed. 😉


And now for something completely different…

Toy Vault is releasing a specialty version of Monopoly. To be frank, I don’t understand the appeal of these custom Monopoly boards and why they seem to multiply like rabbits in heat, which is why I found The Onion’s article on the release of a Special “Regular Edition” Monopoly so hilarious.

Yet, why do I bring up a special edition Monopoly board?

Because Toy Vault is releasing Python-opoly, based on Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Why not? Why not, indeed. 😆

Published by Allyn

A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over ten years in the industry, Allyn has interviewed comics creators and pop culture celebrities, covered conventions, analyzed industry revenue trends, and written copy for comics, toys, and other pop culture merchandise. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story "Make-Believe,"the Doctor Who short story "The Spindle of Necessity," and the ReDeus story "The Ginger Kid"). Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004.

10 thoughts on “On More WordPress Tweaking

  1. My plan is to upgrade to 2.5 as soon as it comes out, and probably switch my theme at the same time. Hopefully I can find something not-fugly that’s also not fixed-width.

  2. Oy. I’m probably going to put it on my test blog first and see how bad the Admin page is, as well as seeing how much it breaks my plugins / theme.

    You’re a brave man, Allyn. 😆

  3. Andrew, good luck on your quest for a non-fugly design.

    You don’t use Kubrick, and that’s a very good thing.

    (I admit the Stonehenge theme I ran with for a few weeks was a Kubrick-derivation. It didn’t really do a lot for me.)

    I don’t have any theme recommendations, unfortunately. I can’t think of any attractive, fluid-width themes.

  4. Andrew -> Nice. 😆

    Actually, what happened with Vista: I needed a new computer, and the one I purchased came with Vista. Lo and behold, they don’t make XP drivers for the new computer, so I’m stuck.

    But I’ve actually grown to like Vista.

  5. That seems to be the way a number of people I know have migrated to Vista. They didn’t upgrade Vista themselves, but they needed a new computer and it came pre-loaded with the operating system.

    Come to think of it, I don’t know of anyone personally who’s upgraded to Vista by choice.

    I’m not curious about Vista — XP does well enough by me, thanks, and I keep telling myself that one of these days I’m going to put together a Linux system just so I can get a feeling for what the fuss is about.

    I am mildly curious about the newest release of Office, though. Even though it would break a lot of things that I don’t need broken. And frankly, when I feel the need to pull my hair out, I just fire up Open Office, which is just a pain-in-the-ass to use. (The reason I have Open Office is because an anthology I was interested in submitting for only took submissions in Open Office’s format. I finally decided suffering through Open Office wasn’t worth it.)

  6. Allyn: OpenOffice does import Word documents…

    I tried Vista’s RCs on my machine. But they were too damned slow for everyday use, much less gaming. It could’ve been poor drivers, it could’ve been shitty OS, but either way it was enough to keep me away. I missed out on Halo 2 (and presumably Halo 3, but that’s the only thing that I’m interested in that requires vista.

    I’ve tried Linux. It’s worked well enough for me with minimal fussing for everything except syncing with my Pocket PC, downloading MS Reader ebooks, wireless networking, and games. The first two I never put much effort into fixing; wireless networking took a couple of hours to get working but eventually I did (and it stayed working); games…

    I got games working in Linux once through some mystical combination of Fedora, ATI’s drivers, and Cedega that I’ve never been able to repeat. Upgrading any of the three irreparably broke things; even downgrading didn’t help any. Even Linux-native games, because of the drivers, didn’t work real well.

    I’m not sure there’s much “fuss” about Linux besides ideology. Everything it does, you can do easier on Windows or a Mac.

  7. Oh, it occurred to me later. I could have just written in Word, and saved it as RTF or as a Word document, then have Open Office change the file into a Word document.

    Too much work, though.

    There are reasons to hate the files Microsoft’s Office suite generates. Usually, they’re giant, bloated messes.

    To think. There was a time when you could generate generally clean HTML code right out of Microsoft Word.

    My real thinking on Linux is partly to play around with it, and partly to have a separate writing computer. Not the greatest reason in the world, but it’s a reason. 😉

  8. I’m almost willing to forgive the RTF bloat, because it allows for more-or-less lossless (except macros) reimport into Word. If another RTF client ignores what it doesn’t know about, no problem.

    HTML, though, there’s no excuse. <font> should’ve never been in the fucking spec in the first place.

    There’s one big problem with using Linux as a writing computer, though: your word processor choices pretty much consist of OpenOffice and StarOffice (Sun’s fork of OpenOffice). You can probably use the distribution’s equivalent of WordPad if you really wanted to.

  9. I love Word 2007. The ribbon makes formatting text easier. I’ve been using it at work and home for the past 6+ months and I won’t go back to 2003.

    Back in 2001, I built a Linux system and tried to live with it and only it. Red Hat + KDE… I lasted a month. My son kept wanting to play a game that was only for Windows… and of course, I had to give in. 🙂

Leave a Reply to Andrew Timson Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *