Considering that I’m the type of guy whose wardrobe consists of a few pairs of dungarees, several T-shirts and sweatshirts plus a couple pair of sneakers (one comfortable pair and one “dress pair”) I find this rather ironic. Can’t get me to change my clothing style any but I can’t seem to be able to keep the same theme on this blog for more than a month or two.

Perhaps this is indicative of a latent personality trait attempting to manifest itself in other ways? Perhaps I’m really a closet clothes hog and I’m taking it out on my poor old blog?

Well…whatever.

Usually, during my bouts of theme-mania, I don’t bother with explaining my ridiculous self as to why I’ve changed the theme yet again but this time is a bit different. It has to do with the up and coming WordPress 3.0 that’s scheduled to be released sometime in the latter portion of 2010.

What type of changes will be going into WP 3.0 is still in the beginning process but one thing for sure, the next WordPress milestone is going to include a new “Default” theme and the one that’s sitting before your eyes is Ian Stewarts’ concept of what it could turn out to be. In fact, if the task of coming up with a new Default theme for WordPress 3.0 is cast out  among the many WordPress theme developers in a sort of “best of” type competition, than his new Kirby theme could very well be in the running.

So since the venerable old “Kubrick”, foundation for just about every 2 column WordPress theme since 2004, is having it’s last run in the 2.9 series of WordPress I decided to try out what could turn out to be it’s successor.

Sounds like a good reason anyway.

Looks a bit like Kubrick, looks a bit like the old K2 as well now that I think of it and yet it’s neither one nor the other and both at the same time–sort of. And I’ve always preferred the minimalistic look myself probably due to not having any talent for designing to speak of.

I really like the theme and it’s functions overall but having my smiling face next to each post title was a bit much so I changed the Gravatar back to Marvin the Martian so I wouldn’t put readers “off their lunch”. It wouldn’t be conducive to gaining repeat customers. And having a rather large “About the author” blurb at the end of each single post was also a bit much for a personal type, single author blog but that was easy enough to get rid of so I’m good to go there as well. And amazingly enough it’s very stable despite the fact it’s still early in the development stage of things.

One more plus in my favor is that the text in the content area has this nice big font setting. Keeps me from squinting while I’m checking for those mistakes that always seem to slip through.

Finally, I’ve always enjoyed having the ability to change the header image built into the theme options and I’m rather proud of this one as I did it myself. By including the photos of some of the more intelligent members of my family…er…members of the human race…er…

…I believe the header image reflects the the title of this blog quite well don’t you?

In this case, somebody dropped a can of used DB motor oil (with all sorts of those horrid little metal non-optimized shavings) into the database canister while the cover was open during regular maintenance thereby gumming up the works something fierce.

The entire database had to be removed, taken outside, sprayed liberally with DB DeGrease™ and hosed down thoroughly. Once the database was completely dry and placed back into the canister, the valve train had to be carefully lubricated with WDB-40™ before bringing back up to speed (we watched the  RPMs very carefully during each phase of restart and and subsequent spin up).

The database is currently operating at nominal parameters and we foresee no further difficulties (we sacked the guy that dropped the damn motor oil).

Thank you for your patience in this matter and we look forward to your further patronage.

Sincerely,

The management.

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(Note new coffee flavored asterisks?)

I Bollixed the Thing III

As you might have noticed by my last two posts, I really bollixed things up on the blog when I switched from a three column theme back to a two column without backing up my text widgets first. Since WordPress changed to the new Widgets setup in the admin without that convenient repository where I can place previously used widgets for safe keeping (a piss poor change if you ask me), I’m always forgetting to copy out the contents of my text widgets to a handy local text document. As a result, that piss poor widgets interface completely lost the entire contents of my left sidebar when I switched themes.

So with only a couple of minor exceptions, I’ve replaced most of my lost widgets with new ones, modified my “obligatory AdSense” to (sort of) fit in with the coffee flavored looks of things, took a hint from Grandad and blatantly replicated his FeedBurner widget and offered up my usual two flavors of search.

Good enough for now however…

There was More Work to be Done

The theme was an old one, last updated when WordPress 2.3 was new. No Gravatars for comments (understandable, Automattic didn’t own Gravatar when this theme came out) and no page navigation!

For the life of me I can’t understand why the heck these theme authors who write up a simple two column, “blogging only” type theme don’t include simple page navigation. You know, those links at the top of the single post pages that point to the next<title> and previous<title>? posts This little reader convenience has been included in the “Default” theme just about forever so I’d think they’d take the hint. Oh well, can’t complain about free stuff I guess.

Either way it meant that I had to somehow include these missing items myself so…

I’m so Proud of Me

With all my amazing lack of PHP and CSS skills I actually managed to enter the appropriate PHP calls into the appropriate files in the appropriate places. This, of course, totally screwed up the looks due to having no styling for these new items so with more panting and sweating I finally managed to screw in the needed pieces/parts into the style sheet thereby fixing all the screwed up looks.

The fact that it took me 2 hours of searching Google, reading various WordPress “tips and tricks” type posts, looking through WordPress.org documents and implementing all sorts of various mistakes until I finally got it right is besides the point. The fact that certain blogging compatriots of mine could have done the same thing in 15 minutes or less is also besides the point. The actual point of the matter is that I did it myself and I’m proud of it, so there.

Threaded Comments?

Of course WordPress 2.7 now offers threaded comments…

Ah, forget that noise, I don’t get enough comments here to warrant any sort of threaded comments. As much as I would love to see more arguments discussions on this blog of mine I wouldn’t even dare to attempt the modifications for that kind of thing and I certainly don’t have the money to bribe ask the author or anyone else to do the modifications for me. Of course, if I posted more  often I’d probably get more comments huh?

Well, if I can ever get to the point where I do and it does then I guess I’ll have to reinstall XAMPP, throw in a copy of the theme, get out my sewing kit and go to work on threading those comments. In the meantime we’ll just have to put up with the old way of doing it.

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And that’s it for another edition of the JT Evening News– All the guff that’s fit to wait. I also had to post this in a hurry because dinner’s ready. I’ll fix the typos, misspellings and whatnot after we’re done.

So you like the theme or what?

Edit: Okay, done eating and jayzus what a bunch of mistakes, misspellings and bad grammar. I think I fixed them all. If not, let me know.

They’re upgrading the hardware, upgrading and tweaking the Linux kernel, replacing the old hard drives with new SSD’s, etc, etc and they began this endeavor by upgrading the MySQL database to the latest version. So bye-bye blog for most of the afternoon thus keeping it from my ever present pestering. Hey, I like that; Ever present pestering. Has a nice smooth sound to it doesn’t it?

To get back to the point, my big plan was to get to work on those little lost widgets and the restoring thereof especially the one that had to do with this blog being the “Dog’s Bollocks“. One must have one’s priorities in order after all.

Maybe if I sneak up quietly I can log in to my Admin before my host notices and decides to work on something else?

And how did I manage to do this, you ask? By messing about with themes again that’s how. Lost all my widgets in the process too. I got stupid, wasn’t watching what I was doing, didn’t pay attention and all my little text widgets went bye-bye.

Don’t even ask me if I backed up all the bits of html that went into those text widgets either.

Me and this blog of mine have a big problem and that’s the way it looks. I never liked the way it looked. No matter how many times I thought I had the right look, 3 weeks later it was somebody else’s look. Content? Content is the most important thing you say? Well hell, I know that. I just have this thing about the look…I don’t know what it should be.

I was talking to my lady about it tonight as a matter of fact. I laid all my frustrations and rantings out on the table and she promptly swept the whole mess into the trash bin and told me that I’d find out the right way to go about it if I just kept at it. I responded by saying that would only happen if I eliminated all the wrong ways of doing it first…and then the thing would probably just disappear.

Bah!

This obsession with this look thing obviously reflects a problem within myself and I’m sure any brain thumper worth his/her ludicrously high fee would the first to agree with me. I’m sure be more than willing to take all my money to find the root cause of this problem. But since I don’t have any money to speak of I suppose they won’t be beating down my door with their finely manicured hands and offering all sorts of lifetime therapeutic contracts of happy mental health.

In the meantime, I settled on a bunch of coffee beans. At least it might keep me awake long enough to restore all my missing widgets. Cups, sugar and non-dairy creamer are on the table in the back…enjoy.