I sure am glad because I have not had a public place to air my thoughts. And that means that either I have been keeping it in or even worse I have not been having any interesting thoughts. I enjoy writing posts that act as a running commentary on interesting thoughts that I have rather than those of a personal nature, but I figured that I needed to break back into this whole blog thing with something easy. And what is easier than spilling about what has already happened to you?

So that was my way of saying sorry for not writing, but I was busy buying a house and getting married! But I’m back!

So on a nice lazy morning I decided to look into converting my permalink structure to one that I preferred. Permalinks are how WordPress describes permanent links to a post. When I first started this blog a couple of years ago (seriously, that long??) I decided on going with a fairly standard /yyyy/mm/dd/post-name type of structure for my posts. However, I am now a little opposed to this since it reveals more information than I would like. I tend to think that my writing transcends time since I am not usually writing about current events so I want to remove a visitor’s perception that my post is not worth reading just because it is old.

After searching online, I came upon Scott Yang’s Permalink Redirect plugin. The instructions seemed easy enough so I:

1. Downloaded it
2. Unzipped, installed, and activated it
3. Accessed the new Settings->Permalink Redirect page. Under “Old Permalink Structure” clicked the link after “Current permalink structure”
4. Accessed Settings->Permalinks. Changed to a /post-id/post-name structure. (I used tags that I found here.)

All of my old links are now redirecting correctly! And that, my friends and enemies, is sweet! Especially since it took less time than it has taken me to write this post. I’m loving WordPress all over again for its abilities, both built-in and extensible.

But I also had some difficulties while upgrading. Namely, I had to fiddle a bit to get everything working alright. I’d been using Brian’s Threaded Comments, and the move from that to the new baked-in threaded comments wasn’t too hard. I just needed to update my theme, which is thankfully a custom one that I wrote so I know the ins and outs of it. So I made a new comments page that looks fairly similar to what it looked like before. The threading was maintained on old posts, and I definitely count it a success.

Then I realized today that my commenting isn’t working! While using Brian’s Threaded Comments, I had been using a custom comment posting page to hinder spam. However that meant that I wasn’t using the normal page. So when I switched to the normal page (wp-comment-post.php), it wasn’t working! I had to realize that the “Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by …” error was because I had some extra lines in the aforementioned comment posting page. Removed those, and all is well.

So if you tried to comment recently and that didn’t work for you, I apologize.

But now that I think that I’m all good, I can enjoy how nice this new version is. You won’t be able to tell because it looks the same to you, but if you’re thinking about blogging then consider WordPress.com (if you don’t have a server) and WordPress.org (if you do have your own server).

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, then good day to you, and I hope that you’re doing well. Cheer up, at least gas is approaching $1.50 per gallon (it was $1.66 at Costco when I got it this morning).

Courtesy of Flickr user Verdesam

I’ve gone from posting things that I really wanted to put out there to posting everyday about stupid stuff that I found online to posting once a week some things that I see in life. And sometimes I even post things that will be useful to someone else.

But one thing is constant, this is my blog, and I get to do whatever I want with it! And I love that!

Still, the fact that I’ve written that many entries is pretty amazing to me. Let’s not think about how much time was spent writing those things. Rather, let’s enjoy the fact that I have an outlet by which to release my thoughts. Priceless, I’m sure.

Leaving Comments On Other Blogs

However I’ve found that it’s not quite as to do with comments that I’ve left on other blogs. The reason for that is because I don’t have that central place to access to see all of my comments! I’m not very well going to remember the URL of every post that I leave a comment on. That would frankly be ridiculous.

I’ve found a key to this problem. I’m sure that there are others out there, but I think that this one works decently enough. Check out co.mments.com if you want to see what I mean. In fact, you can even let other people see what you’re commenting on so that they can check it out and see if they’re interested in the same posts! Here is my public co.mments.com page.

And now I present to you: Soi-disant

I’ve only changed my theme once to (Not So) Fresh as I posted in New Look. That was 8 months ago and since then quite a bit has changed.

Why I wanted to make my own theme

1. Have a unique look to my blog

   I’ve come across other blogs that had the same theme, and that wasn’t too exciting for me. I want and like to be my own. So even though the last one did look nice, it was unfortunate because other people thought that it looked nice as well.

2. Learn much, much more web design

   CSS in particular, HTML and PHP to a lesser degree since I already knew a fair amount before doing the theme. Part of who I am wants to understand how things work and why. So learning new things can be very exciting to me. Not to mention the fact that it’s very pertinent to my profession of computer programming. (Although I must admit that I believe that I lack the creativity necessary to actually ever become a web designer. I know the nuts and bolts but lack the vision. )

3. Create a fluid display

   I wanted one that would show up well on the very popular 1024×768 and 1280×1024 screen resolutions in addition to any other screen resolutions. I’m sorry to say that it’s very likely that anything below 1024×768 won’t look all that great. A fluid display means that the text and page elements will expand according to how much space is available. My previous theme was fixed width so it didn’t look too great to me on higher resolution displays.

4. Speed things up

   The last theme used a fair amount of images to create all of the nice effects. And that’s nice for people on fast connections (which at this point is a very fair amount of people). However there still are people on slower connections, and I want my blog to be accessible to them as well, too.

Soi-disant

I got the name of this theme (Soi-disant) by looking up a word of the day online. Lame, huh? I thought it was cool because it means calling oneself thus, self-styled, or so-called. Seemed interesting to me so there it is.

So I did it all for this theme: header logo, PHP code, HTML, CSS. It was a learning experience, that is for sure.

WordPress theme designer: check

The plugins that I have added and am now using on this blog are:

1. Brian’s Threaded Comments which allows for comments to be in threads rather than just as a single list. This is nice because it can get confusing in the way that I used to just use an “@ user” type of response. The only drawback is that I’ll probably have to limit the number of levels that nesting will occur because it will make the comments unreadable as they get more and more narrow.

   This code looks stupid and ugly on my current theme, but I’m going to change it very soon so I’m still going to post it. Most people don’t care about this, but I figured that I’d put it out there if anyone did find it useful and didn’t know too much PHP.

   So is here is the change so that there will be no “Reply to this comment” link if the comments for a post are already closed:

   <div class='reply'><?php global $user_ID; global $post; if ( get_option("comment_registration") && !$user_ID )
echo '<a href="'.get_option('siteurl') .
'/wp-login.php?redirect_to=' . get_permalink() .
'">Log in to Reply';
elseif ('open' == $post->comment_status) {?>
<a href='#' onclick='moveAddCommentBelow("div-comment-<?php echo $c->comment_ID ?>", < ?php echo
$c->comment_ID ?>, true); return false;'>Reply to this comment</a>
< ?php } ?>
</div>

   I also added code from my original comments.php in my theme file so that if a user is logged in, it will not ask them for their information (name, e-mail, etc). Although I don’t think that there are too many people with accounts on my blog (go for it, it’s not so bad) I figured that it was at least a solution that I enjoyed more for my own sake. However the code change was too much for this so I’m not going to post it in this entry.
   Other than that it’s pretty super! I like the look, and I hope that others will appreciate it. And most of all I hope that it fosters more discussion!

2. Comment Timeout lets me fight another problem on my blog. And that problem is spam comments. Hateful, despicable spam comments. They take at least a little bit of time to go through sometimes when people’s comments get caught in moderation. So I’ve decided that since it rather makes sense to close the comments on old posts, I will. It’s not as if people particularly post comments on my old posts anyways.

   Additionally it has the ability to keep the comments active if the post is deemed “active.” The plugin is fairly full-featured with some customizable options such as the timeout period, etc. Not a bad plugin if I do say so myself. It was a better option for me than the very basic Close Old Posts plugin written by Matt Mullenweg and listed on the wordress.org site.

Let me know what you think of the new plugins! Does it make you want to leave more comments?

So after participating a bit at One Man’s Blog (who is also having a great contest for becoming a “member” of his site right now where he gives away something to the winner of a random drawing), and enjoying it very much I decided that I would do something similar to what he does.

Instead of removing the nofollow on each and every commentator’s link, he instead creates a refreshed list of the top 10 commentators and provides them with a link back that way. I think that after seeing how I can sometimes be getting the single comments just to get a link, I think that this is a more prudent decision to minimize single-line “spammy” comments.

So therefore I am going to go for installing the Show Top Commentators plugin.

The way to get onto the list is as follows:

1. Use the same information (name, e-mail, website) when leaving comments. It might be easiest to simply register (which I have opened up) on my website. You’ll be able to log in and not have to enter your information each time you leave a comment.
2. Leave comments! It’s fun anyways, I think to get to give feedback to the author (and be assured that authors do enjoy feedback, especially this author).
3. The plugin will gather its data from the last 60 days, so be active else you fall and cease being the king of the mountain. Hm I always enjoyed that game (king of the mountain, not falling).

Oh an don’t worry, it will start immediately and retroactively use the comments that you’ve left. So we actually don’t start off with a clean slate, but I wouldn’t think that would be fair anyways to those that have graced me with their participation.

I’m going to remove myself from any sort of communities for adding dofollow. I don’t really get too much traffic from them, and the traffic that I do get is usually people just leaving a single comment to get the link back to their site. I like the idea of adding dofollow, I just don’t like how it’s worked out for me thus far.

Comments might not make the world go ’round, but they sure are more pleasant than the alternative.

For example, in the recent comments in the sidebar, it was showing my comments, but I have removed that so that now it will only show comments by people other than me.

And then for the Stats page that is displayed, I have decided to only let it show information that is unrelated to me. Hopefully that will give some better statistics for you to see on what is actually popular with other people rather than just with me!

Passion – God, family, friends, fun
Purpose – Much more than the average joe
Pursuit – A life that is in line with what I believe
Position – Sitting. Always sitting.
Pummeling – Rude drivers. Pummeling is a funny word to use here.
Progress – Doing alright, doing alright. Not doing so well on not repeating myself, though
Personality – Honest, realistic, slightly sarcastic

Usually you’re supposed to tag people, but I think that I’m just going to leave this open-ended. If you want to do it, go for it and let me know! I can add you later and we can pretend like I tagged you in the first place.