Welcome To Earth David

Ever since I switched over to Wordpress I have been searching for the perfect dark theme template for my blog. Today as I was reading Large Tony’s Blog, I clicked over to Dannation and saw that he is using a template called Black Letterhead which is designed by Ulysses Ronquillo. You can see a demo of the template here. I think I’ll be working on switching over to this theme over the next couple of weeks. I really admire the way Dannation modified the template with a header image at the top and I may try to do something similar…. not that I want to copy his blog or anything like that.

As many of you who’ve upgraded to the new WordPress 2.5 version have maybe noticed there is an option on the Plugins page which basically suggests that you can auto-upgrade a plugin. I would strongly suggest you do NOT use this function right now. First off, this is not a feature that is directly supported by plugin authors, it is a function that works outside of the plugin. So if something goes wrong there may be no way for any plugin author to help you fix the situation since the plugin itself did not do the action. Secondly it’s been acknowledged that this feature is really not very robust yet and may very well fail and hose your entire WordPress insall.

I would strongly suggest that you continue to download all plugins yourself and upload them to the server. In the case of AWSOM.org plugins they all upgrade themselves properly when you reactivate them, so it’s actually not really more difficult anyway.

I did not know about this. I guess this is something in the latest release of Wordpress that has not yet fully been fixed. I’m glad I read this over at AWSOM.org even though I only just started installing extra plugin’s a few days ago and haven’t yet had to upgrade any of them. Thanks to Harknell at AWSOM.org for this information.

I just found a FireFox extension called ScribeFire. If you use the FireFox browser and use WordPress to publish your blog then I think you will love the ScribeFire extension. No longer will you have to keep a window open with your Wordpress Dashboard to publish posts to your blog. With the ScribeFire extension you simply click a tablet icon in the corner of your FireFox browser and ScribeFire will open up to allow you to post to your blog. It’s awesome! Try it out for yourself.

What is a gravatar?

A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on weblogs?

Why do I need a gravatar?

A gravatar is not something you absolutely have to have, but in my experience since I signed up for my gravatar I have found it very exciting that my picture shows up automatically on someone elses blog who supports the gravatar. As stated above, gravatars will help identify your comments and that can help your favorite blog authors recognize you instantly and it just makes it more fun to leave comments. Also the people with weblogs that are gravatar enabled with appreciate you that much more when you comment with a gravatar. It’s like having a web presence that follows you online wherever you go. I’m not sure about other weblog software packages out there, but I know that the latest version of Wordpress supports gravatars and I think it is a wonderful thing because it just makes comment sections on these blogs look way cool.

How do I get a gravatar

Signing up for a gravatar.com account is FREE, and all that’s required is your email address. Once you’ve signed up you can upload your avatar image and soon after you’ll start seeing it on gravatar enabled weblogs!

Sign Up Here!

You can come back here after you get your gravatar set up and leave a comment on this post to see your gravatar in action.

This is a PayPal shopping cart plugin for WordPress 2.5 and above. Bookmarked here so that I don’t forget about it since it might come in handy for when I get ready to open my craft business back up again…. although I can do well enough on my own to set up a paypal shopping cart without a plugin.

I’ve been sitting here for a few hours surfing page after page of Wordpress themes and haven’t been able to find one that I like well enough to use. So I went to google and did a search on how to edit wordpress themes and I found this neat tutorial from Essential Key Strokes. I’m thinking maybe I’ll just edit the basic template with a nice background and see if I can figure out how to put a banner image at the top instead of the color gradient. I do like the basic theme for it’s simplicity, but it alone is a little too plain for me. I’m gonna play around and see what I can come up with.

Today is a BIG day for my website / blog. Today I switched over to Wordpress v.2.5.1 from an old template I had created using Cutenews CMS. Cutenews was great for awhile, but for me it seriously lacked much needed spam control. That was one of the main reasons why I switched over to Wordpress. But I also switched over to Wordpress because I love how you can just drop in a new template that someone else has already made for you whenever you decided that you want a new look for your website / blog, and I love how you can create static pages within the Wordpress blog itself without having to write any HTML. Don’t get me wrong now, I love to create my own web pages and have been doing so since around 1998, but my HTML skills are just basic skills and I’m kinda lazy to try learning all of the CSS tricks and Web 2.0 design stuff.

So it only took me a few days of playing around with Wordpress to realize that I needed to switch over to it for all of the reasons above, but the main reason as I said was for the spam control which I need to get set up today as well as go find a pretty new template.

So anyway, here is to a new beginning. Maybe now I can actually start getting some readers to this site now that I have changed over to a decent blogging platform.

I just activated Akismet spam control in my wordpress. Supposedly it automatically blocks all, or most spam comments. I really wish Cutenews could have implemented something like this, but it’s too late now Cutenews because I have already switched over to Wordpress and I am loving it. I’ll be watching over the next few weeks to see how well Akismet works. I hope it does well. I hate spam!