Bluehost have upgraded WordPress to 2.0.5 so I ignored this warning and clicked ‘Upgrade’ Click on Upgrade only if no files, languages, themes have been modified you haven’t added mods to this installation of WordPress After all, the whole point of hosting a blog is to add plugins and modify themes. I find it slightly odd that Bluehost have no blog or other means of communicating the availability of these upgrades. ...
Feedburner - WordPress.com provides users with statistics about feed subscriptions. At best, these metrics were questionable and I used to provide two RSS feeds (WordPress and Feedburner) so the metrics didn’t capture all feed activity anyway. As there is no equivalent functionality in WordPress 2.0.4 out of the box, I resurrected my Feedburner account and installed this WordPress plugin which automatically routes any subscribers to the WordPress RSS feed through Feedburner. Sitemap - I started from zero when I created this site so I could try my hand at organic gardening. The only search engine I submitted to was Google. When I was trying to encourage Google to index the new site, I discovered that a sitemap could accelerate the process. This WordPress plugin generates a sitemap which tells the Google crawler about the site structure and recently updated pages. The sitemap automatically gets updated after each post and helps to reduce network traffic.
After my recent move from the community of WordPress.com, once again I truly feel like a ‘Blog in Isolation’. There are a few features I missed from WordPress.com: Dashboard - I can still check the WordPress blog, Top Blogs and Top Posts independently. Forums - While I can still participate, I don’t really feel like a member of that WordPress community any longer. Comments - signed up for coComment that tracks all comments (not just those on WordPress.com) Tag surfer - can create Technorati feed(s) to replicate this but this was a nice, dynamic feature. New WordPress themes - If I like them, I simply download and experiment on this blog. Latest WordPress posts - an occasional diversion. No real equivalent (unless I login to my placeholder WP account) Avatars - Not bothered but favicon is your friend.
The Barthelme theme for WordPress is close to absolute perfection. My only minor reservation is that elements of the sidebar (Pages, Categories, Recent Comments) and the title of the Next/Previous posts appear in UPPER case. This is one of my pet hates as it looks like SHOUTING which is RUDE and, IMHO (sic), is completely at odds with the minimalist, understated feel of the theme. However, a quick edit in ‘style.css’ to change two occurrences of ’text-transform: none;’ to ’text-uppercase: none;’ fixed that. ...
After two months and two days, the music has stopped, the theme rotation carousel has travelled full circle and finally come to a halt. WordPress.com offers a total of 40 themes (37 when I started) and I have experimented and laboriously captured screenshots of every single one. I have tried out all the WP themes as they became available but it was interesting to live with each theme for a day or so. ...