WordPress

I finally got around to installing a new theme here on the site.  I was both eager to install a new theme—after all, how many thousands of other sites looked just like this one—and yet also apprehensive, because I’d gotten the previous theme tweaked just the way I wanted it.

So, I’d be interested in hearing from the readers as to the new layout.  Do you like it?  What can be improved?  More importantly, what’s broken and needs to be fixed?  Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated, and I value your patience as I tweak and tune this new look.

Thanks for reading!

UPDATE:  The front page of the site is broken when using Internet Explorer 6.0 on Windows.  Not being an XHTML/CSS expert, I have no idea why it’s not rendering correctly.  It renders fine with Safari, Camino, and Firefox (on both Windows and Linux)—sorry, IE users!

UPDATE 2:  The archives index and tags index pages are now working again, tag information has been re-added to the bottom of each post, you can browse articles by tags, and the layout has been tweaked slightly.  Everything is rendering fine on all browsers except the home page on IE6 (I tested Camino on OS X, Safari on OS X, Firefox on Windows XP, Firefox on Ubuntu Linux, and IE on Windows.  I’m still not sure of the cause of the IE-specific layout issue on the home page.

UPDATE 3:  The strange formatting error with IE on the home page turns out to be a problem with some of the articles, where I’m using monospaced fonts to represent a command line or a piece of code.  I’ve updated a few of the articles causing that problem and it should be better now.

I had been stubbornly clinging to WordPress 1.5.2, which worked just fine and, in all reality, provided all the functionality I really needed.  I figured it would probably be best to keep up with the newer versions of the software, however, so I decided to upgrade.

To give all credit to the WordPress developers, the upgrade process for WordPress itself was very straightforward and rather quick.  The trouble came in having to update or replace certain plugins that weren’t compatible with the newer versions of WordPress.  Combine that with some manual hacks I’d performed to help ecto work better with the Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) plugin, and you have yourself a real pain in the neck.

Fortunately, I stumbled across a really helpful nugget to assist in the ecto-UTW issue.  The XML-RPC Plugin for WordPress 2.1 incorporates the Robin Lu hacks (linked above), so that ecto can store tags in the keywords field and work properly with UTW.  Yay—no more manually editing code!

The rest of the problems surrounded updating the theme templates with new PHP calls to reflect new plugins; for example, you’ll note the “Recent Comments” section in the sidebar is different (required a new plugin).

Only a few things remain undone:

• The site search tags don’t seem to work just yet.  You get a “404 - Page Not Found” error when clicking on a site link tag.
• The site’s theme has not been completely updated in all places, so you’ll see different layouts in different sections of the site.  I searched for a new prebuilt theme I could apply to the site, but couldn’t really find any that I liked.  I guess I’ll just continue to tweak the existing theme.
• There are a few new plugins that I would like to use now that I’ve upgraded, but those haven’t been added to the site or incorporated into the theme just yet.

I anticipate that things should be worked out reasonably quickly, but I appreciate everyone’s patience in the meantime.