WordPress themes & plugins
I am famous for starting projects and not finishing them. Its a male thing I suppose. In my case the remains of these 1/2 finished projects litter the hard-drive of my computer in the form of WordPress themes, PhpBB themes, WordPress plugins, Java projects and the like. Well, no more. I finished something! I released it and at the time of this post, there have been over 80 downloads so far.
The WordPress theme “Henge” was released at the weekend. It was a statement on what I feel about the phenomenon of “sponsored links”, monetized blogs, search engine optimization and all of the rest of the “commercialized blogging” world. Specifically, it’s released under a Creative Commons “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported” license that allows non-commercial use only, with the provision of freely sharing and hacking the theme to your heart’s content.
This is only the first such theme. I have others in the pipeline. Also coming are a couple of plugins (actually, sidebar widgets) that will be similarly for non-commerical use only.
This just puts me in mind of a scene from “The Mummy” where Evelyn translates a section of hieroglyphs and exclaims “take that Benbridge Scholars!” – releasing the software was my own “take that, sponsored link spammers!”
Brand new day
If it wasn’t already obvious, the site has undergone a major overhaul! The old template was looking a little long-in-the-tooth and I decided it was time for a change. I also wanted to improve the consistency of the look and feel for non-blog pages.
This blog has been managed since its very inception using Blogger.com and I’ve looked at several blog / content management systems over the years. My goal was to (eventually) host the blog, its comments, polls and a discussion forum using a system that I’d written. Until that time, I’ve finally settled on using WordPress as both blog and CMS for static content. Big changes indeed!
Old (Blogger) posts were imported and in the process I noticed that formatting has been approximated for a lot of them – custom PHP in the original has been stripped – so expect some of the previous 606 posts to look a little bare compared to their original incarnation. I dont plan on categorizing any of the old posts, but expect that in the future, I’ll make liberal use of both titles and categories that Blogger never used to support. While their new beta supports them, I want more control. I want my own data on my own server. Moving 606 posts out of Blogger was a pain in the ______ so I want the data where I can get to it for future moves to my own system!
Expect to see some WordPress widgets and plugins promoted through this site too. Getting this site the way I wanted has taught me a lot about WordPress and has forced me to create custom code for archives and how I handle the CMS side of managing pages for my writing. If you need a custom theme created, or WordPress implemented, give me a call! 