Live Truly

In between classes, holidays/fam events, flu, and workouts, I’m working on updating and cleaning up most of my sites, including this one. The theme update is the first step. I think it’s nice and clean.

I’ve changed the blog theme to the Zinmag Futura. However, I don’t need most of the flashy gizmos, and so I disabled them. But I love the thumbs and the rotating front page featured and slide/glide menu. The only issue I’ve had was with the thumbnails links not working correctly (discussion thread), but hopefully that gets cleaned up soon. Also, I just found out that Zinmag Redox had exactly the things I wanted without the extra features (for anyone that wants to save an hour or two in setting things up).

I added Sociable and Akismet, I love these two plugins. My amazon link plugin (which really speeds up getting the book pictures) doesn’t work with the latest version of wordpress. I also used the built-in tag cloud feature of wordpress. In the future I plan to add a photofeed and a connection to 43things.

I’ve also been cleaning up the categories. I don’t have it fully planned out, but the plan is to simplify and make them more natural. Most of the book posts will go into the book categories, financial stuff will go in its own category, job stuff in its own category rather than being split among three or four. I don’t know how relevant this categorization stuff really is since I don’t believe in categories (tags are a far better metaphor for describing the world) but nevertheless we all categorize things to help us make quick decisions (for better or worse) so for now I’ll play along. It’ll also help with the thumbnails (for posts which don’t have a specific thumb, adding category-based generics makes sense).

OK, time to go study. Have a great day.

I updated my other site to WordPress 2.0. It seems nice, I just wish all my plugins and theme mods worked with it. I’m going to have to wait until I finish several projects and until that site is running smoothly before trying anything on this site.

It’s not just the lack of RSS buttons. I’d like a clean usable theme for this blog. Something with breathing space. Does anyone have suggestions? I really like Connections (the current theme), but Landzilla and the Northern Web Coders are also really nice. But I think even simpler might do the trick. Maybe I’ll just use the ProBlogger Clean theme here too. Does anyone have some clean and simple and usability friendly theme suggestions?

Last night I registered the domain and started writing the first few articles as dreamhost (yes that’s my reference link) set everything up. It only took about half an hour before I could see the site and I used their one-click install to set up wordpress. Piece of cake. I went to bed happy knowing that I just made the first steps, and did so with no problems.

This morning I wanted to add some stat measures and change the layout a bit, and to my horror, the host couldn’t be found. Panic.

Did someone attack the site? Did it get banned for some strange reason? I went into the dreamhost panel and everything seemed legit. I checked the server status and again things seem ok. Then I reread the email from the registration and it said:

Hello,

Your registration of … has been processed.
It will probably take 1-3 days for your domain to begin to work as the new dns information propagates across the Internet!

“1-3 days” - Perhaps there’s no need to worry yet. I submitted a report just in case, but I guess I can still take a shower and eat and attend to other business while everything gets set up. There’s nothing else I can do there anyway.

Update: Everything was back up within two hours.