So apparently when I upgraded to WordPress 1.5.1.3 back on June 29th, something happened to my .htaccess file. This was no fault of WordPress, I think I just deleted it by accident. This caused every post to appear broken.
And lucky for me, no one noticed.
Today marks the one year anniversary of this blog being set up with WordPress. I celebrated by making a donation to Matt Mullenweg.
In a year I managed to make 110 posts, get 100 legitimate comments, and get 8,873 spam comments.
I have to admit I’ve learned a little bit about a whole lot.
As I’m sure some of you have noticed, over the past few days I’ve updated tompreuss.com to WordPress 1.3. Now WordPress 1.3 is still in alpha, but it’s stable enough for me. It took me a while to fix my stylesheet and get everything to look the same as it was, but pretty much everything is great now.
The way themes are handled just blows my mind.
Whoa. I totally got hit with some comment spam today. 13 comments with a link to some poker website.
So I’d like to take this opportunity to give some props to WordPress‘s comment handling. It took me less than 20 seconds to delete them all.
Amazing. And poker-dude, I’ve got my eye on you…
I fixed up the CSS around here today. Now everything should look fine, even in Internet Explorer. If you think anything looks weird, let me know.
If you like, you can use the style section of the menu to compare the current (“tom”) to the old (“tom_old”). Just make sure you set it back to “tom” when you’re through.
Update: I uninstalled the style switcher plugin on November 1, 2004.
Yeah, so if you view the menu I tweaked yesterday in any screen resolution or browser window size other than the one I was using when I set it up it doesn’t work right.
So I’m going back to the float until I can figure something out. Or someone makes a suggestion…
I did a bit of work today on tompreuss.com.
First I fixed up the menu. Since the beginning, I had been using a float. Now I’m going with absolute positioning. So instead of being three pixels off in Internet Explorer, it’s about ten pixels off. Weird. Of course, this was the main reason I made the switch, so I’ll have to look into that.
I also did some work on the link manager and added a few empty pages. This is in the hope that I will be motivated to work on them in the coming weeks.
However, the big improvement of the day was the installation of Alex King‘s Style Switcher. Check it out. The default still should be the same, but now you can choose to view the site in a variety of ways. Ahh, the beauty of CSS.
Update: I uninstalled the style switcher plugin on November 1, 2004.
As per Joey’s request, tompreuss.com now has a comment preview feature.
It’s a modification of LaughingLizard’s Comment Preview for WordPress 1.2. Pretty nifty, if you ask me.
Cool. I just worked out all the details for a trip this weekend. I’m going to be heading up to Vermont to visit my brother and sister-in-law.
Now I’ve got something to look forward to this week.
Also, I’m working on getting some sort of photo layout thing going here on tompreuss.com. I’m thinking it will motivate me to start shopping for a good digital camera too. Any suggestions?
Ever since Matt put up that list of well-designed WordPress blogs he’s come across, I’ve really been trying to spruce up the design around here. I even played around with a few attempts at a logo before calling it quits. I just couldn’t even come close to what I really want it to look like.
I suppose I shouldn’t compare tompreuss.com with high-end sites like those on the list.
Well, on to that menu…
I did some poking around today. I finally moved that middot I had to where I actually wanted it. I’ll bet you didn’t even notice.
I’m working on getting these posts into catagories. Nifty, huh?
Also, look for images to be appearing soon! That’s right, actual pictures and maybe even a logo!
Yes, I am keeping up my pledge to not be lazy around here. You just… can’t tell yet.
That is all.
I checked out the WordPress IRC channel today. I asked about my floating problems, and was quickly directed here and here.
Now I just need to figure out how to implement that stuff. It should be an interesting adventure.
So I think I’ve been slacking off a bit in terms of the website. Putting in a lot of time this weekend working on another (work related) website has kind of gotten me motivated to work on tompreuss.com. The work was nothing fancy, of course, but getting everything to validate and work right in a couple browsers was kind of a boost to the ol’ self-confidence.
So I’m going to kind of divide my time over modifying WordPress a bit and then working some other non-blog content.
I’ll do that.
I was just poking around, and I discovered that Googlebot visited my page recently. Anywho, guess who’s the top search result for “tompreuss“? I’m not doing as well with “Tom Preuss” (no quotes) though. I’m somewhere around 210. Adding the quotes puts me at twenty-one. “Guess and Check” (with quotes) comes up around 353.
Not that I’m counting or anything.
Work today was good. I did much more work on the SEM. So cool.
I really have to start cleaning stuff up around the house. I’ve been far to lax of late.
I also might want to think up some better stuff to post. Like funny stuff. Stuff someone might want to read. Or I could just talk about what I do at work. Hmm… maybe funny stuff will happen to me at work. I can only hope.
Well, I managed to get a comment on yesterday’s post. Yay for me. Thank you, Max.
So today I started my summer internship. It was great. So far. We’ll see about tomorrow. I have to be in the lab at 7:30 a.m. to start working. I suppose I might as well get a jump on being a morning person again.
Looks like I’m going to be spending some time tweaking stuff a bit more before I get some real content up. Or maybe I’m just lazy after a day at work. We’ll have to wait and see.
One of the great things about using WordPress is the ability to add on to it using plugins. They seem to be getting better every day. I can’t really decide which ones I would even want to use. However, what I’ve been doing is checking out a bunch of the blogs of some of the heavy posters over in WordPress’s support forums. Some of them are absolutely amazing. Here are some of the good ones: Alex King, Max Thrane, Podz, Nick Momrik, and Matt Mullenweg.
And then there’s the hacks. So much good stuff I’m going to have to look over. I actually went ahead and tried one of these out, to kind of test my ability to edit the proper files. You might have noticed that all the links in this post have the “title” property set. That is thanks to this hack right here.
Once I’ve had a chance to really look over these other blogs, I’m going to go ahead and try some plugins out. And even though I pretty much have the layout how I wanted it, I’ll keep tweaking it. Those three pixels keep bothering me. I think it has something to do with how I’m floating the menu. And of course, I also have to work on the other pages of the site. You know, I’ll have an “about/info” page, and a “photo” page, and maybe some other pages. It’s going to take some time, but if I did everything all at once I wouldn’t have anything to blog, right?
Well, it might have taken me a little while, but I managed to fix that error I talked about earlier. Seems that the problem was in the default CSS that WordPress gave me. The div class for the “Comments” link didn’t have it’s “clear” property setting right. It was clear: all; and all I had to change it to clear: none;. Turns out “all” isn’t even a valid value for the clear property.
Now the menu is three pixels too low in IE. Still looks great in FireFox though. Download your copy today!
Yeah, so after publishing that last post, I checked in IE again, it seems like that big gap appears after the first div in the content and pushes the second content div down below the end of the menu.
Now that I know what’s happening, I just need to figure out how to fix it.
