A Path Less Taken

As of today I just activated version 1.0 of the Min Theme for WordPress. It was created by yours truly as an armature attempt at a Minimalist WordPress Theme for version 3.0 and beyond. So good by (and good riddance) to the Bogus theme that I created. Min is not perfect, far from it, but I think it’s an improvement. I will keep refining it as I have inspiration to do so.

If you are interested in lessons learned I have several minor ones.

• Keep your div’s to a minimum to ease your styling effort. 960 Grid System div’s can have multiple classes assigned to them.
• When it comes to CSS less is more. Period.
• WordPress add_filter does not seem to work in the comments page. I had to add it in the functions page.
• The built in Theme Preview option is insufficient for theme development. The Theme Test Drive plugin solved this problem nicely.
• Never start from scratch, build on another theme. I knew that one already, but never hurts to mention it again.
• Do it because you want to. There are TONS of free and cheap themes out there so the only reason to build your own is if you want a special look or for the fun of it.

If you stop by please drop me a comment and let me know what you think, good or bad. All feedback is welcome.

My most recent diabolical plan was to automatically update my Facebook “wall” with my blog posts. My friends on Facebook would increase my blog audience by, well, hopefully more than 0. Anyway, there were some technical difficulties with the plugin or the user, but I’m willing to concede it was probably caused by cosmic rays if the plugin author is. Basically when I configured the FT FacePress II Plugin I entered my Facebook mobile account in both the Profile and Page update areas. That did not work. According to Alan who is the super helpful author of the plugin (Thanks Alan!). I can’t use the same account in both places. I’ve update the settings and if nothing else is wrong you should see this blog post on my Facebook page. I need to send a follow up e-mail to Alan to have the property edits prevent the user from using the same Facebook mobile e-mail twice. Either that or he could read this post? Yeah, I may go with that. Here’s hoping you see me (or more specifically this post) on Facebook!

WordPress 3.0 is here! I updated today and as billed the admin interface is lighter. The new default Twenty Ten theme is nice looking, but I only activated it long enough to realize I didn’t like the default layout. I may play with it later when I have more free time. Other interesting features include custom post types, built in short link support and WordPress MU integration for single or multi-site solutions. In honor of the launch I removed the gradient background color from the “bogus” theme and that seemed to help the look. I’ll keep exploring the latest version of WordPress to see what new or interesting features I can find.

Update: Found a really good post on the new features in WordPress 3.0 so I thought I would share it here. It’s called 8 New Exciting WordPress 3.0 Features and it’s great because it has code samples along with the features that require custom code in the theme. Enjoy!

Since lots of folks I know are on Facebook I decided to update my blog to automatically show my posts on my Facebook page. Cool right? Truth is I just wanted to see if I could get it to work. For you Facebook guys and gals please excuse the geeky posts that are sure to follow. For anyone that actually has an interest in web development, enjoy.

In the event that you “care” the blogging software I’m using is WordPress and the Plugin is called FT FacePress II, hence the name of this post. This is the second one that I’m trying as the first crashed and burned!

WordPress is a great blogging platform, but out of the box there are many neat things that it does not do. Enter WordPress Plugins to close the functionality gap and make for happy users. This list is a revisiting of my favorite WordPress plugins. All of those listed are ones that I take advantage of on my blog. Here is the short and sweet list.

• Akismet – A spam blocker that traps comment spam and traceback spam before it gets published to your blog.
• Bad Behavior – A link spam blocker. I run both Bad Behavior and Akismet because I despise link spam bots.
• Browser Detection – This plugin was created by me to do simple browser detection. The code was mainly taken from the web, but I have been unsuccessful thus far at finding the original author or site so I could provide proper credit.
• Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin updates major search engines to new entries on your blog. If you are ready to get serious about SEO this is the tool to start with.
• Graceful Pull-Quotes – Pull Quotes are a great way to add professional polish to your blog. This plugin is super easy to use to get your pull-quotes going.
• SexyBookmarks – My newest plugin addition. Sexy Bookmarks allows you to easily add Social Bookmarking Icons to each post.
• WP-Syntax – Powerful syntax highlighting using GeSHi.

Although that’s all the plugins I use, there are hundreds of useful plugins available for you to try. If you are still interested in other great plugins you should read the blog post 20 Must Have WordPress Plugins for Every Website by Amber Weinberg. This is a pretty good list to give you an idea of the amazing variety of plugins available for WordPress

Enjoy