Redefining this blog
As my fourth year of both blogging with WordPress and tinkering with it comes to a close, I have decided to redefine the focus of this blog. Originally, it was just my personal blog. It grew as an extension of a previous WordPress blog I had that focused on my hobby of amateur and high power rocketry. However, the most popular posts have always been the material that focused on WordPress itself - plugins, themes, etc.
So, for 2008, I am going to move anything that is not specifically related to WordPress off this blog. That may take some time because I will need to make sure that links don’t get broken in the process just in case someone needs information on how to make a duct tape wallet. While I haven’t decided on specifics, I’ll probably redirect everything else via .htaccess. I did that before when I moved everything to this domain and it worked well.
That move will allow this blog to focus on support for my existing plugins, development of new plugins, and WordPress tips & tricks. As a WordPress user from way back, I feel that I have a good handle on the inner workings of WordPress that I can share with others. I don’t recall the exact date I began with WP, but I do specifically recall upgrading my WordPress install to Mingus (released 5/22/2004), I think my first version was Miles (1/25/2004) and that was what inspired me to move away from Blogger. I was excited about the control and the ability to “get under the hood” and tweak my installation with plugins. Then I started making my own plugins and themes and I learned what worked, what didn’t, and why.
As a result of this journey, I have improved my skills in php, css, and MySQL (I was originally an ASP/VB developer way back late last century - but that’s another story). Where I have strengthened my skillset in WordPress is the knowledge of using WordPress’ hooks, filters, and native functions as much as possible. I see so many themes and plugins developed that recreate the wheel when they could just as easily rely on WP to do the heavy lifting. If they did this, their product would be more scalable for upgrades. An example of this would be the recent changes that WP made by dropping the category tables and moving to a definable taxonomy.
There was much griping and complaining focused toward WordPress by frustrated users. Unfortunately, this frustration was misdirected. Here is an example of what I saw. Some users were relying heavily on plugins and themes that, instead of relying on WordPress to get the list of categories (i.e. get_categories), they wrote their own sql queries to pull the list. Now in some instances this might be a necessity, but most often, I would say that it’s not. And that is just one example. As a result, upgrading was an issue for many. Personally, I found that my upgrade to 2.3.1 from 2.1 went off without a hitch. I attribute this to what I have learned the hard way over the past four years.
But I digress… As I said, the majority of this site’s traffic is coming to posts that are focused on my plugins or on WordPress so I am going to work to expand on that. I’ll probably included what I’ve learned about blogging in general along the way - what works, what doesn’t - specifically when it comes to monetizing. There are some things I’ve tried that worked and some things that were just a complete waste of effort.
I’m looking forward to 2008!
From my bookmarks:
Cool retro fonts - some free, some not, all great. Look carefully and you’ll probably see some that you recognize - I see them from time to time in ad spreads and on labels. Old Navy is an example. If you like retro, you’ll love Font Diner!
From my bookmarks:
A giant list (74) of CSS galleries. If you can’t find your CSS examples or inspiration here, they don’t exist!
New Verse-O-Matic 3.4 Released
After much anticipation, I have finally finished Verse-O-Matic 3.4. This simple to use WordPress plugin allows you to place a random or predetermined scripture verse on your blog. Simply install, activate, load the widget and you are off and running. The easy to use administration features allow you to add and edit your list of verses and change settings to allow for random display (either daily or every page load), verse-of-the-day, or set a specific verse to display until you change it.
This version improves on the new features that were added in 3.0 and integrates the administration functions into a single file. Widget support is included, so you do not need to know any php or html to use this plugin on your blog. The major changes in this version were incorporating the admin functions into the main file, improving the admin area, and cleaning up the code.
New admin features include the ability to sort your list of verses by ID, Book of the Bible, or by Date (for verse-of-the-day use).
From my bookmarks:
an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter, for Mac, Linux, and Windows. Also includes Apple TV support.
![[Valid RSS]](/wp-images/valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed")
