The Sandbox theme recently added to WordPress is pleasant enough but the original themes developed by Scott Wallick from plaintxt.org are absolutely superb.
Clean, white, minimalist, striking, understated and refreshingly different from the thousands of themes out there.
One of the things I like about WordPress is the sense of community. Wordpress users (and developers) willingly help each other out on the support forums. There is also a FAQ with useful information for newcomers and experienced users alike.
You can find similar, related WordPress blogs of interest usings tags and you can also discover new material by examining the league tables of the most popular WordPress blogs, individual articles and the fastest growing blogs over on botd.wordpress.com.
So, imagine my surprise when I saw this humble blog nestling at No. 38 in the list of ‘Fastest Growing Blogs’.
My life is now complete. Almost.
Maybe a fraction too late for Doug Burns (whose Blogger blog has been recently hijacked) but WordPress have just announced the availability of XML import/export utilities, primarily for switching between self-hosted and WordPress.com blogs but may also be useful for backing up your blog and facilitating other platform migrations.
Tempting, very tempting
My mailbox is bulging with letters from recent and occasional visitors worried that they may have missed some WordPress themes in the recent blitzkrieg of posts during the ongoing and exciting Theme rotation policy.
Worry ye not. I am meticulously capturing screen dumps of each theme in a Flickr photoset so the poll will be absolutely fair and equitable (and Regulus will win).
The current theme is Banana Smoothie. I wonder if coffee enthusiast and cocktail maker, Jon Emmons, might be voting for this one.
Oh no. WordPress are now promising to add import/export functionality which is the only barrier stopping me from migrating to my own hosted WordPress.org blog.
That would open up a whole new world of plug-ins, themes, statistics...
WordPress has a total of 37 themes. I have recently fallen out with my long standing favourite and top scorer, Regulus 2.1.3, after he blatantly deceived me over the state of his CSS injury.
Consequently, I will be implementing a rotation policy (with immediate effect) to give each squad member a fair and equitable chance to stake his claim (hand in glove).
Then I will conduct a poll of all my loyal readers (both of them) to determine the winner.
Then I will reinstate Regulus 2.1.3.
You are currently admiring Solipsus 1.5 (aka Cartoon Network ).
Maybe Doug's right. Perhaps WordPress isn't a suitable blogging platform for serious technical Web journals (with 473 lines of 10046 trace) after all.
The latest theme (Solipsus 1.5) announced for WordPress is described thus:
Black & Brown design, inspired by Adult Swim of Cartoon Network.
That's all folks !
WordPress recently bought a ton of resilient hardware and have undoubtedly improved the quality of service for the 200,000 WordPress users.
Matt Mullenweg gave an interesting interview to Om Malik and Niall Kennedy about how startups can plan for future capacity, provide resilience and maintain performance & scalability.
The IT architects at the UK ISP, Blueyonder, should really listen to this podcast.
In the first 13 minutes of 20 April 2006, there was a single hit on this blog (no names, no pack-drill). Curiously, the recently added WordPress feed statistics reported a surprising and rather unlikely number of 53 estimated number of people who used certain tools to read your feed' in the same period.
Now this is simply not true. Most of these 53 'people' were RSS spiders and automatons dumbly and repeatedly polling for any activity. The associated human being is probably down the pub or asleep.
While the RSS feed may have been subscribed to at some point (by me in all probability) in the past, they are all now sitting unloved and unread in a still born Web 2.0 beta account.
I go away to spend a few days sitting on the UKs gridlocked motorway network and I discover those chaps at WordPress have been making yet more changes.
The Regulus theme has been upgraded to 2.1.1 and now includes bug fixes, support for sidebar widgets, personalised header graphic and lots more besides.
In addition, every single post is now prefixed by 'Posted by Andy C'. This is completely superfluous in my case and I would dearly like to turn it off. This is my personal blog. Who else is going to be posting to it ?
Also, the categories and 'Add comment' now appear at the top of the article rather than the bottom which I also dislike intensely as it adds distracting clutter.
WordPress have also added feed statistics which is a welcome addition although the statistics are not as comprehensive as those provided by FeedBurner so I'll continue to keep the Feedburner feed alive for now.
Oh - and before you all jump to signup at once - WordPress had an outage over the Easter weekend.