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

After putting off a re-design for nearly a year I’ve finally opted to update the look of this site in honor of my 100th post (well 102, but who’s counting). What you are seeing now is the first cut of the new design. I consider it an evolution rather than a revolution. The design is based on top of my Welcome theme which was itself built completely from scratch. Taking this approach allowed me to reduce the design time from approximately a month for Welcome to less than a week for the new Bogus theme. There are some parts that remain largely unchanged while other parts have had a big over haul. I plan to continue tweaking fonts, colors and images over the coming months to try and improve the look incrementally. If you have any interest I’m happy to give you a brief tour under the hood.

Right out of the gate I knew I wanted my new theme to use the 960 Grid System. I’ve become of fan of this fixed width layout approach to styling web pages. It appeals to the programmer in me with its simple symmetry and incredible ease of use. The benefits you can get from 960.gs imho far out weight what you give up. Having said that I know it’s not for everyone. You will have to decide what you are trying to achieve in your visual presentation to determine if it’s right for your site.

After electing to use 960.gs I spent a fair amount of time retro fitting the necessary DIV’s into my theme. I tried to simplify in some places, but a lot of the content remained very similar to speed the process up. The overall goal was for the number of DIV’s to stay constant or be reduced in every section. I think I achieved that.

960.gs also comes with a reset.css and text.css that I used for the new design. All explicit font-family styles have been removed from the site and it now relies solely on the text.css or default styles. The result is a much “plainer” look that was in line with my idea of simplicity. I may have to tweak specific fonts to improve the overall presentation, but I wanted to see how this worked for a while.

For a color scheme I chose nothing. To be more specific I chose gray, but the effect is basically the same. I opted for a combination of navy blue and dark green links with a variety of approaches to visited and hover behavior depending on the section. I was trying to create subtle interest and see if the dark blue and dark green could work together. This is one aspect of the site that I will likely re-visit. In an effort to help the future color designer me I made sure that all colors and borders appeared at the beginning of the respective CSS blocks in the style sheets.

New in Bogus is the inclusion of images. This marks the first time I included images as a way of accessorizing my theme. This is something that I talked about adding in my previous theme but never managed to achieve. The images at the bottom are stock RSS and WordPress links that I obtained from various sources. They are public domain images that I liked and I thought they worked with the theme. The other image (only one at the time of this writing) is a custom photo that I took myself. It is actually an slightly enhanced copy of one of the original site design sketches. I had to color the background of the sketch with a colored pencil for my wife’s camera to take a picture that did not wash out. Although it’s not perfect, I’m satisfied the result adds a little interest to the design and I think will do just fine until I find something I like better. I used the excellent GIMP 2.6.8 program to scale the image to 160×120 which reduced the size from 2,197 KB down to 12 KB. I feel confident this should provide at least a minor bandwidth improvement. GIMP is a GNU Image Manipulation Program that is really nice for an open source tool.

The navigation links were converted to navigation buttons thanks to the blog post Create GitHub-Style Buttons with CSS and jQuery, MooTools, or Dojo JavaScript by David Walsh. Thanks David! I opted for the jQuery approach since it’s the Javascript Framework that I’m most familiar with. By adding jQuery to the theme I opened the door for future plug-ins. These could be 3rd party plug-ins or ones that I create myself.

Some of the other changes were about repositioning and re-formatting certain elements of the site. The Tag Cloud and Categories List were moved to the footer. The Archives list was shortened to one year duration. The navigation stayed on the right hand side. I originally moved it to the left, but eventually I decided that the most important content in a blog is the current post. Keeping the posts on the left helped to keep the focus on them as opposed to the post navigation and links. Lastly, a few quotes of interest were added in the layout. I may change this to a random quote generator later, but for now I just picked some that I liked.

The rest of the site is largely unchanged from the original Welcome theme. You may be curious why the new theme name is Bogus. The simple answer is that it was the first name that came to mind that started with a B. This kept the theme at the top of the Manage Themes list in WordPress while I was designing it. Scrolling burns calories.

That’s it for a high level overview of the new design of my blog. I hope you found it useful or interesting. If you have any suggestions for improving the look or for anything else please post your interesting or creative comments in the comments section below. And no, I am not Ray William Johnson, but I do approve this message.

Peace