Check out my new home page. It looks a lot better than the old placeholder did. It took about an hour to create.
Archive for the 'Site Announcements' Category
I’m in the process of updating to Wordpress version 2.5. The site may look weird for a few minutes.
OK, I think we’re good now. Fingers are crossed, but I think I’ve fixed the problems that cropped up in the theme. Let me know if anything looks obviously wrong.
On the good side, they redesigned the backend that I’m using right now to type this, and it’s a lot prettier. Much less messy. So far, I approve.
I’ve change the theme for JDHarper.com from Ceruleus, my contest entry for the Sandbox Design Competition, to this one. It’s based on the fabulous K2 theme, which looks great all on its own. I added some missing features (e.g. limiting image sizes to 500px across so they don’t poke into the sidebar if they’re too wide) and tweaked it a little here and there, but for the most part, it’s just the standard K2 theme.
K2 adds some neat features to the blog, most notably the live comment addition. When you add a new comment to a post, it will add your comment to the bottom of the list without reloading the page. It’s really spiffy looking. Try it out!
The “theoretically related posts” part of the individual blog pages has moved into the sidebar, and I’ve moved the archives from sidebar into their own page, linked in the header above. I’ve also switched from using the Google Reader widget in the sidebar to using one from del.icio.us, so that I can post links from sites that I’m not subscribed to.
Anyways, let me know if you find anything that looks broken, and tell me what you think about the new theme.
This site is hosted through A2 Web Hosting. They’ve been a great host for me so far, offering great prices on my web hosting while still giving me some fantastic support.
They’ve also just gotten a lot better: Two days ago, they announced new package rates. For just $7.95 a month, I get 250gb of storage space, Ruby on Rails, unlimited email accounts, unlimited domains and subdomains, unlimited SQL databases, and access to the latest versions of MySQL and PHP. Get more details on their web hosting plans.
Since I’ve always gotten such great support from A2, I’ve signed up for their affiliate program. If you buy web hosting through any of the links to A2 from my site, you’ll be helping to support this site–and believe me, that will be very much appreciated. A2 has even given me a coupon code to help you out: 10% off any A2 Hosting plans, just use the coupon “a2hostmost”. Expires 12/31/2007.
Don’t worry, I don’t plan to write posts advertising for A2 like this on a regular basis. Just remember that you can always great hosting service through the link on my sidebar.
Can someone explain to me why, all of a sudden, when you search Google for “jd harper” I’m no longer the top result?
Same for live.com.
Yahoo still has me at the top–for now at least.
Likewise for one of my most-googled posts, about an obscure error code for Cygwin. Searching for “proc magic mismatch detected” on Microsoft’s Live.com and on Google used to give you my guide to fixing the problem. Yahoo still does.
Could it be that (until just a minute ago) my home page at http://www.jdharper.com/ used PHP to redirect to http://www.jdharper.com/wordpress/ ? I changed it to do that when I was setting up my test blog for the Sandbox competition because my previous htaccess file was screwing up my subdomain setup. Was that a mistake, search-engine-wise?
I hate how the big search engines are so inaccessible to web developers. Visiting my account on the Google Webmaster page tells me that my page is in the Google index, but it doesn’t tell me why I’m suddenly no longer in the top search results like I used to be. It took me two months to get into the Google rankings at all, and it ticks me off that I’m suddenly back to next-to-nothing.
I mean, I’m doing everything I can to play nice with the search engines. I’ve even installed a plug-in that automatically updates a site map so the search engines can find all of my pages. But now they’ve both betrayed me here, without even letting me know what the problem is.
I’ve gone through all of my blog posts on JDHarper.com and reorganized them into something resembling useful categories.
I am not going through the Blog Jones archives and doing the same. ::shudder::
I plan to reorganize my blog categories today in hopes of making them into some sort of useful tool for readers and for myself.
Hopefully this will not result in all of my posts being pushed into your RSS readers.
If you’re looking at this on my main home page, this post looks a lot different than the rest of my posts. It’s called an “aside,” and it’s a way for me to write a quick post, on the order of two or there sentences, without taking up all the space that a full-sized post would take. It appears that Matthew Mullenweg at Photo Matt Jason Kottke at kottke.org was the one who pioneered this concept, and I think it’s just brilliant.
I’ve just reinstalled the Postie plugin to the blog. This plugin is a massive upgrade to the Wordpress default post by email function. It handles multiple categories, images, and HTML, and it blocks unapproved email addresses.
And it actually seems to post the text of the email instead of just the subject line, which is a big plus.
I love knowing that I can blog from anywhere!
I’ve put together a new site design. I’ve been wanting to make something light and clean-looking for a while, and with my brother away at camp, I’ve had a lot of free, undistracted time to work on it.
It’s very much inspired by the default Tumblr theme. When I first saw that, I loved the clean, spacious look of the site, and I wanted to have something like it. So, yesterday and today I spent several hours modifying the default Wordpress theme.
The other cool thing is this new theme supports Wordpress Widgets, which make customizing the sidebar incredibly easy.
The icons are from the Silk collection at FamFamFam.com. This was also an opportunity for me to play with the Yahoo Grid, which made developing this theme much easier.
Let me know if anything looks out of place or if you see any errors. I’ve looked over everything over and over again, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t missed something.
Hope you like it!
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