Working On A New Theme
Anyone who’s been a regular follower of this blog over the years knows that I have a tendency to change themes at the drop of a hat. Something in a different theme will catch my eye and I’ll install that theme for awhile until one comes along with something else that’s "better".
I’m constantly telling Tyler that I don’t even think that I could go to a designer to get a custom one done because I don’t think that I could accurately describe to them what it is that I want. I have the design in my head, but I just can’t put it into words. Yeah, I’d be one of those customers from hell that web designers love *so* much. I don’t want to be, but I know that I would.
So, I’ve downloaded the Sandbox theme for Wordpress and I’m going to go to work on it, trying to design a theme that I’d be happy with. You won’t see much in changes around here for awhile, though, as I have a ’sandbox’ installation on both my home and work machines that allow me to test there before I go live with anything. This is something that I’ve done for a couple of years now, and even blogged about it before.
If nothing else, it’ll help me work on my CSS and PHP skills, too, so that won’t be a bad thing.
Do These Lists Even Mean Anything?
The UK’s Guardian has released it’s list of the 50 Most Powerful Blogs, and while I haven’t read enough of the top 50 to take exception with some of their choices, what’s more refreshing is that it doesn’t assume that all bloggers are white, American, male geeks. In fact, in the whole list, there’s really only about three that I would really consider ‘tech’ blogs - Boing Boing (#2), TechCrunch (#3), and Engadget (#16). The rest seem to be a balance of political, celebrity and personal blogs, with the odd sports blog thrown in.
I’m a little surprised that Digg wasn’t included, but it’s possible that it doesn’t meet the Guardian’s criteria to be defined as a blog. What I find to be an even bigger surprise is that a number of the political blogs focus specifically on the upcoming U.S. election - what are they going to be doing after the election in November? Start planning for 2012?
Anyway, after perusing this list, I thought I’d detail a few that I’d probably pick up. I’m already subscribed to Boing Boing and Engadget, and wouldn’t go near TechCrunch, so what you’ll get here are non-geek blogs:
- Kottke.org - an old time blog that goes back to the late nineties. It’s one that I’ve always heard of, but never took the time to follow.
- icanhascheezburger.com - As wildly popular as the lolcats have been, I never really checked into it to see what the appeal was. I’ve since changed my mind, because there’s some pretty funny stuff on there.
- CopyBlogger - okay, maybe this qualifies as more of a geek blog, but it doesn’t really cover the tech world so much as how to write about it, or anything else for that matter. A blog about writing online. Subscribed. Because I can use the help
Oh, and the title of this post? In the long run, I think the best reason for having lists such as these is to help introduce you to sites that you might not have heard of otherwise. So, yeah, they do serve a purpose.
Moving To A New Host
For the last few years, this site has been hosted by my employer, and while that turned into a pretty good deal for me, there were still a few things about it that eventually got me to thinking that it might be time to look for another host.
Security, for one. All that hosting was done for free, and could have theoretically ended on a moment’s notice. Or if I decided to move on to another position somewhere else, I wanted to ensure that there would be no downtime for the site. There was also the fact that uploads to my site had to be done over a secure FTP connection, meaning that I couldn’t just embed images in my posts when using Windows Live Writer, because it doesn’t support SFTP. I would have to upload the image to the site, and then point to it in the post. Not a life altering thing, but still…
So now the site is being hosted by BlueFur.com, a local webhost, and I have to admit to being more than impressed by their whole setup. If anything, their Wordpress configuration script was almost easier to run than the “5 Minute Install” promised by Wordpress.
And another great thing about them is that if you sign up with them, and enter promotion code rtdn they’ll even give you a 15% discount. Hard to beat, especially when the hosting starts at $6.95. So, give them a try and remember the promotional code to get your 15% discount: rtdn.
A New Design for rodtempleton.net
As you may be able to tell, I’ve decided that this site needs to be updated and completely redone, so I’m going to be taking a bit of time to get everything set up the way that I want it.
The theme is what I’m going with, but I’ll be working on the links and other stuff over the next few days, so I ask that you have a little patience, and we’ll get things back to running normally again.
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