Ever since migrating to WordPress, I haven’t done too many configuration updates to the blog – short of simply getting it running. But one thing I love about using an Open Source blogging platform is the community behind it, and especially all the plugins that they create!

Recently, I started dabbling with a few new plugins, and even had a go at a bit of customisation of my own! So in that vein, here’s a few site changes that are now live on gerrod.com:

• Archives: I created my own archives plugin which takes up a lot less space on the sidebar. It uses ajax to lazy-load the archives by month, and jQuery to do all the nice javascript stuff. I should really look at pushing this into the WordPress Plugin Directory, but in the meantime, if you’d like a copy for yourself, you can download all the code here.
• Statistics: Statistics are back! I used to have these when gerrod.com was a home-grown piece of software, and now they’re all migrated across, too. You can get to the statistics page at any time via the nav menu, above.
• Photos: I’ve long been a fan of Picasaweb for photo albums, but I never liked that you had to “leave” gerrod.com in order to see the photos. Last week I found an awesome plugin called PWA+PHP which allows you to show your picasa albums all from within your own website; so once again, gerrod.com has it’s own photo gallery. The link in the nav menu has been updated accordingly!
• Shadowbox: I’m now using Shadowbox JS to display all image links within stories.

Enjoy!

Most people probably read this blog via RSS or on Facebook these days, but for those of you old-school enough to still visit, please take a moment to admire my shiny new theme.

Basically, I wanted something that was simple, easy to read, and which ironed out all the minor little functionality problems that I had with the previous theme (e.g. post author not visible, search didn’t show the whole article, etc). I think I’ve achieved all of these goals!

There’ll be a few more tweaks in the days to come, but for now, I hope you like it. Feedback welcome!

I enjoyed looking through the statistics on my 1,000th post so much that I decided to make a permanent page of it. So now, you can see general statistics, the top stories (by comment count), and the top commenters (as well as the number of times they’ve used various names for themselves) – all updated in real time! Go ahead and check out the Statistics page, permanently accessible from the menu bar at the top.

Oh – and as always, if your browser doesn’t force a stylesheet refresh, and the page is looking a little vanilla, try hitting Ctrl + F5 (or Apple + R for the Mac fans).

Yes yes, it’s about time, whatever… I’ve finally updated gerrod.com to reflect our move to the UK. As usual there’s problems with caching of old stylesheets, scripts, etc. – so try hitting Ctrl + F5 (or Command + F5 on Mac) to fix it. Truth be told I haven’t finished the update, there’s still a heap to do (please don’t look at any photo albums), but you get the general drift, and I was sick of the old skin.

Suggestions welcome!

To be truthful, these updates are mostly a few weeks old, but I only just thought to write about them:

• Searching: Well, you’ve always been able to search gerrod.com (as far as I can remember), but now it has it’s own page, complete with tag cloud, and recent searches (to an extent). Check it out!
• Syndication: I got rid of the ATOM feed; lets be honest, does anyone even use ATOM? Instead I’ve replaced it with a comments feed. Your browser should be notifying you of the feeds available as you read this. Note that the address for the main feed has changed! If your browser isn’t showing you that an RSS feed is available, then it’s most likely you’re using a crap browser – so consider updating.

Yes, it’s time for the bi-annual changing of the gerrod.com site*. Changes this time include:

• Upgraded from ASP.NET v1.1 –> v2.0
• Lots of new features powered by Javascript (try rolling over a name on the “Recent Comments” list, or check out the photo albums)
• Commenting now enabled for photos
• Much more flexible tagging structure
• Reader profiles (more on that later)
• Fixed the bug whereby pressing ENTER after a search resulted in a blank page
• A fresh new skin (still under development, i.e. more changes to come)

Unfortunately though, things seem to have somehow been mashed in the upload process. Files somehow magically changed their names during the transfer. I’m not sure what went wrong there, but things that should have worked off-the-bat, simply didn’t. I think I’ve fixed most things, but please let me know if you find something that doesn’t work as you think it should.

Oh – but as always – if it’s simply that things don’t “look right”, try hitting Ctrl+F5. I always have problems with browser caching.

* Not a real event

gerrod.com got a few minor tweaks this morning, namely a few updates to the banner and skin (Note: Please press Ctrl+F5 if you see any problems!), and some tweaks to the stylesheet and HTML for validation. As it turns out that its impossible to get valid XHTML Strict using ASPX (in v1.1 at least), due to the way it renders the form tag, and the javascript used to handle post-backs.

Also, the target attribute is invalid in strict doctypes which immediately prevents my site from qualifying. So rather than go through and remove all my target=”_blank” attributes, I’ve changed to XHTML 1.0 transitional.

gerrod.com has successfully been migrated from DiscountASP.NET to SeekDotNet. Unforunately the domain transfer won’t go through until Monday, and then updates to the nameservers won’t take place for another 72 hours. So until then, everyone’s RSS and Atom feeds are more than likely broken, and the address bar of your browser will look a little funky too.

For those who are interested, here’s a list of new features and what-not.

Continue reading →

Over the next few days, I’ll be transferring my website to another hosting company. The first step is to transfer the domain, then after that I need to transfer the actual files.

So if you can’t access the site sometime over the next week, that’s why – but don’t worry, it will be back sooner than you know!

I spent a good portion of the weekend making some updates to gerrod.com for your web-surfing enjoyment. Firstly, there’s no longer categories – instead, each article can be assigned to a number of “tags” (ala GMail). Now all I have to do is go back through the stories and re-tag everything appropriately…

Secondly, I completely re-wrote my admin site. This one probably won’t have much impact on everyone, but hey I think it rocks so I thought I’d share anyway .