Michael’s Wordpress über-theme, k2, is available in alpha form. Give it a try.
I finally bit the bullet today and upgraded about 4 family and friends blogs up to WordPress 1.5.1.2 which had been languishing at variously 1.2 and 1.2.2. Surprisingly, this wasn’t too hard, all the blogs were variants of the original Kubrick for 1.2 so I simply took the new default theme, replaced the default css (rembering to change the theme name) and the default images. After replacing the contents of the admin, includes and other folders with the 1.5 files it was all good. Just some simple tidying like upgrading plugins and amending sidebars .. et voila! All done! I may even drop K2 in place when thats out. Looks like Ill have to upgrade to 1.5.1.3 now.
Scott Woods-Fehr has ported mallow to TxP. Ill add a link on my mallow page when I get a chance
map of blogs near me.
I am looking to see how to remove the ?s= from the WP search form, making it a clean url (not a dirty url) and it seems others have been here before. RESOLVED
Due to a current wave of Poker spam, I am trialing the Bad Behavior anti spam plugin which Fernando also uses. Feel free to test comment, tell me if theres a problem. So far its killed about 380 spam comments in 3 hours or so!
Ive just finished upgrading about 8 sites I deal with to Wordpress 1.5.1.2, all seems OK so far.
A smattering of new paint over here at ‘the fool’ as Ive just decided to start calling my humble dwellings on the World Wide Whatsit.
Nothing major, still uses the idea (which has grown on me somewhat) of making the latest post the most wham bam in your face, and the previous posts a little subtler with sort of mid-importance stuff sliced in between and hopefully irrelevant frippery banished to the back pages. Ive move asides up next to the recent post and flickr back where asides was - seems to make more sense as its now actually _aside_. Ive tightened up the design a bit, namely with slightly smaller type (Ouch, some of you may not like but it *was huge*).
So its gone from basically green/red to blue/red - not a colour combination Id have normally chosen, but, i confess it was a bit of a random choice, but still it just grew on me as I applied it over the site. Looking again now, it is maybe a bit girly but Ill stick with it for a bit and see.
No doubt Ive missed some bits of css as my file is in quite a state but as ever Ill fix that as and when I see it or its pointed out to me.
I still need to choose a banner pic Im happier with, but this will do for the _noooo_.
For old times sake, this is what the site _was_:
Fernando has fixed some problems with Livesearch in Wordpress and done a write up.
Another weighted plugin, Weighted Words shows configurable words used in your posts bigger or smaller depending on the frequency they appear, see my archives.
Fernando has done a write up of how to install livesearch in WordPress.
After updating to WP 1.5.1, some of the sites RSS feeds have seemingly randomly stopped working (Pompeyblogs for example). I dont know if this is down to 1.5.1 but its seems to coincide and Ive not changed anything. Yes I have re-uploaded the files again.
Fernando has the fix. 
Ive finally upgraded to WordPress 1.5.1.
Check out the new BB Live Archives, so good that I got ‘em too.
Natty little include page plugin for WordPress.
Shamelessly ripped, I present live Gravatars in preview. Yes, live Gravatars! Either work it out from here, or follow my breadcrumbs. [via]
Via quick search on WordPress Ive found a lovely little plugin which searches pages in WordPress sites.
The sandbox has been now fully filled, emptied, cleaned with boiling water and TCP - so welcome one and all to the future. For the future is here, the future is now, the future is sflwa. Be it, see it, roll around in it like a dog rolling in fresh grass on a summers day. … /hyperbole. To remember.
My sandbox (revert) is coming along well and should be getting close to being activated (so long as I dont tweak too much more).
Ive spent today tidying up some bits I wasnt happy with and simplifying my files, thanks mainly to Phu Ly’s post. Also, thanks to a timely post from Michael Ive found some decent plugins to play with, namely: flickrss to display my most recent Flickr images, Auto Moderate Comments which seems to be a slightly more customisable version of OCM (even though Id only just installed OCM) and Mark J’s Subscribe to Comments 2.0.
All this new plugin fun did create atleast one problem - the display of recent Flickr pics. Ive had to do a sort of pseudo 2 column thing with the Latest Post and Im not entirely happy with that yet so we’ll see.
Sandbox getting full
For the last few weeks the only spam protection Ive had is the built in WP1.5 systems plus a list of spam words built up over the last year or so. I’d turned off my previous spam protection as they just weren’t consistent enough with how they caught spam or gave false-positives. Now, from Michael’s suggestion, Im trying OCM which from what I can tell just automatically sends any comments from posts 10 days or older into the moderation queue.
Assuming adding this post doesnt bugger it up, ive got my sandbox site (click me revert back from sandbox 
- Its not really a separate site, more of a theme. Well OK, its not at all a separate site and most definitely a theme. I did it this way as then its _live_) up to a decent stage now. My last stumbling block with the filtering of posts I managed to fix by separating the content of index.php into home.php and archive.php which removed the need for all the is_home() and is_archives() conditionals so thereby simplified the files greatly, but meant duplication so means I have to edit more files - shame.
This leads me nicely to a question. What exactly does index.php do if you are using archive.php, home.php, index.php etc?
This useful page says
The elements you are already using can just be removed from the index.php file and moved into the appropriate file such as adding your sidebar contents to sidebar.php and your footer contents to footer.php, etc.
so Im _assuming_ that means that index.php can be empty. Well, this is mine and it seems fine atm.
So, my final quandary. Do I make this the active theme now, or see what else I can do? I think I shall leave as is for now. The danger being that ‘as is’ will probably continue for a while.
I should point out that the idea for the latest post more prominent than the older posts owes more than a little inspiration to Phu Ly’s If..Else site.
A ha, Ive got it, with index blank, these pages go bonkers, well sort of, its the home.php file. WP uses index.php by default for this page so if index.php is blank it uses home.php. So Ill stick archive.php in there and hit refresh…
Hmm, that didnt work .. entering debug mode.
Hmm, that didnt work .. entering debug mode.
exiting debug mode…
adding this to the top of home.php
adding this to the top of home.php
if (is_paged()) { load_template(get_paged_template()); } else ...rest of home.php and then using the contents of archive.php in paged.php seems to work. Seems if you have home.php and paged.php, WP favours home.php *over* paged.php even if youre on a paged page for some reason.sandbox update
nuclear moose candy and podz are leaving the WP forums due to a vocal few. [via]
In honour of Brendans sandbox for pre-developing his site, I now have my own also. Its accessible via the style switcher at the bottom of the page. This means you can see what Im currently working on for my site. Its more than likely going to be quite unstable with odd text all over the place for debugging purposes.
Im not sure how this will go as its quite a departure from my usual dev system of working on the localhost on my PowerBook and then uploading that live to my site.
sflwa3b - stable, current site. sflwa sandbox - development site, quite possibly unstable.
*UPDATE:* This has been useful.
The winners of the WordPress 1.5 theme competition have been announced and sadly Im rather disappointed. Its not bitterness that Mallow didnt win anything, honest. Some of the winning choices just seem odd in my opinion when compared with us losers.
Oh well, move on and if youre using Mallow - enjoy it, if youre switching from Mallow to one of those entered into to theme competition - have a good look around, theres some great themes there.