WooThemes 4-for-1 Special

Here’s how I got my 4 themes: My lucky night.

After over 2 years away from WordPress workings, I quickly figured out that with my limited time there’s no way I would be able to catch up with all the new, and more complex, innards of WP, and manage to construct a decent website.

I had a quick look around the ‘premium’ professional WP theme services (and there’s some good stuff out there) as well as the few still-free themes or theme frameworks that look professional (Carrington and Thematic caught my eye).

In the end, I settled on WooThemes who impressed me (as far as one can tell without actual access to the themes!) with their combination of feature-rich as well as eye-catching, balanced design. The fact that I got more bonus themes than I had bargained on is … an extra bonus!

Filed under: Blog Tools, Web Development, WordPress

Firefox WordPress.com Sidebar Widget

Ruff has concocted a neat sidebar widget which allows you to post to your WP.com blog straight from the Firefox sidebar.

Filed under: FireFox, Wordpress.com

Widgety-doo-dah, widgety-day

I really thought I was going to leave all this stuff for a while and concentrate on more pressing domestic tasks … and then, along comes a Widgets plugin which of course cries out for fooling around with.

Filed under: WordPress

Dabbling with Photopress 0.9.4

Unfortunately, photopress 0.9.2 stopped working properly when I updated my WP installation at my PinkBat personal blog via SVN to the latest trunk (revision 5542). So I decided to give 0.9.4 a try …

Yay, it’s working!

However, I continue to have the same issue that’s plagued me for a long time now: If I try to use the Photopress option “use permalinks” (my preference), it doesn’t work. Clicking on the thumbnail (which should take you to the full image) merely causes the page to be reloaded (but with the correct image URL in the browser address bar!).

I have finally worked out that there seems to be some mysterious link between this permalink option and the option Link to album ("The code for inserted images can point to the image in the album or straight to a popup containing the image").

Permalinks do work – but only if I have this Link to album option set to "No".
If I want to point to the images in the album, I have to disable permalinks.
I would dearly love to be able to have both permalinks as well as the album link enabled and working correctly.

Filed under: WordPress

WP 2.0 Theme Competition

The competition is now closed and 188 themes are available for download.
Well, theoretically … there seem to be server problems; and the download facility at uploading.com is incredibly tacky and only worked the second time round.

Filed under: WordPress

SPIP – a content management system

I’ve known about SPIP for some time; but never evaluated it because it was only available in the original French version. By chance, I noticed that it’s mushroomed into many language versions now, including English, thankfully.
Plus, they operate a Subversion repository, so that makes evaluation on my local machine a cinch. Goody!

Filed under: Blog Tools, WordPress

Phenomenal Speed

I don’t know what switches they pulled here at wordpress.com … but the lags of the past few weeks are gone.
I’ve got blistering speed now, and it feels awesome.

Filed under: Wordpress.com

Photopress update: 0.83

It keeps getting better and better.
I’ve started using it over at FussyPoodle. I’m finding it intuitive – it fits nicely into the blogging workflow – and there’s nothing superfluous in it.

Filed under: Graphics, WordPress

Interview with Matt and Donncha

conducted by Tom Raftery. Podcast is here.
I’ll listen to it later, while preparing stuff for the barbie …

Filed under: Podcasting, WordPress, Wordpress.com

PhotoPress plugin: updated to 0.73

A minor but very useful update: Photopress 0.73.

Filed under: WordPress

Title field now offers pop-down access to previous post titles

Just noticed this. How curious!
It’s rather like the browser address bar history of URLs.
But: Why would I want to repeat a post title I have already written? Only if I wanted to write a follow-up to the original post.
Is it cool and therefore useful – or useful and therefore cool?

Filed under: WordPress, Wordpress.com

The visual editor – TinyMCE

I found myself agreeing with this post: Visual Editing still needs work.

It really now begs the question as to whether TinyMCE is the right choice for a rich text editor. How on earth are they gonna fix this mess? It would probably take a lot of collaboration with the TinyMCE team – lots of time and work. Just wondering when is the right point to cut your losses …

I can only assume the WP team have looked into the other options out there.
FCKEditor seems to be almost overkill, for my personal taste; I have to say I like the look of XStandard – maybe I’ll find the time to give it a test run.

Filed under: WordPress, Wordpress.com