WordPress

The Blog is Back

Richard Green on

For anyone who frequents my blog, you may have noticed it’s been offline for a couple of weeks.

I recently moved to a new server with my current hosting provider, and I took this opportunity to seperate a forum I run and the blog into their own seperate MySQL databases. Unfortunatly the blog had some issues, which today turned out to br a typo’d database username. We live and learn 🙂

Now that the blog is back, I’ve taken the liberty of upgrading to the latest version of WordPress. I’ve also decided that my old theme was looking tired as I do about every six months or so. As you will see, I’ve switched to the new TwentyTen theme that’s included in the new version of WordPress. This is only temporary while I make my new theme, which is going to be one I saw by Touchality based on a Windows Phone 7 Metro UI.
For the record, this is also my first ever post from the Windows Phone 7 WordPress application.

Updating and Invigorating

Richard Green on

Over the last 24 hours, I’ve made some notable changes to the blog to try and improve it’s looks and usability:

  • Removed some of the information shown about the post area on both the home screen and the single post view. This is to try and tidy up and streamline the post reading area. The information I’ve removed is the categories and post author.
  • Relocated the comments button from the top of each post to the bottom.
  • Increased the spacing between the bottom of one post and the top of the next one.

All posts and comments written by me on the blog will now report (past and future) as richardjgreen instead of the old daddygreen. This is an effort to consolidate my social network efforts into one entity. I’ve also updated my profile picture on all of my social outlets to something a bid more modern looking.

From this, I have now installed a new WordPress plug-in called TweetMeMe which shows a green tweet button on each post allowing you to retweet anything I blog with super ease and this plug-in is very common on other tech blogs so it’s well known and trusted.

I’ve also updated the blog version to the latest version of WordPress code as well as increasing the number of my tweets shown from four to five.

If anyone spots any news bugs or issues or has a any great ideas and visual elements I could add or improve on the site then I’m all ears.

Gravatar – Unifying Social Media

Richard Green on

Yesterday, whilst working on trying to make the blog look beautiful I noticed something bizarre.

A comment of mine had my picture against it which good, however I was confused as to how it got there because I have never put my own picture on the Baby-Green Blog anywhere.

I looked at the URI for the image and it was this:
http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f582c100a1c12ef21361c5b06a9ab278?s=32&d=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D32&r=PG

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The Change The Blog

Richard Green on

In line with the changes to the design of the blog, I’m going to be making some other changes.

I’ve never used Categories properly. This is because I was using this WordPress installation as a MUI even though it was the standard installation.

As of today there will be a Category called Personal and anything by Nicky, myself relating to family or anyone else family oriented will go in the Family Category.

I will be creating a load of categories over the coming days and weeks to accommodate my posting habits and over time, re-organising my posts into them.

The net result will be a better and more effective experience using WordPress. This, coupled with the recent Permalink structure change on the blog giving it nicer URLs will also help.

Finally, I’m going to be changing the name of the blog.
As the only person to use it is me and as I mostly talk about technology related stuff these days, here’s the new name:

Baby-Green Blog :: The Mostly Technological Ramblings of Richard Green

It is a little bit of a mouthful, however it will better suit the topic of the site and will hopefully help improve the SEO of the blog.

UPDATE: Actually thinking about this, I’m going to stick with the categories, but instead use them for authoring, so whereas my posts are currently split into Richard for personal and Technology for my drivelling posts, everything for me will be under Richard now. This makes more sense based on how effectively I’m tagging my posts.

New Blog Version

Richard Green on

So I decided this evening that I should update the blog to a new version being that I am missing out on the ability to Tag entries and have a tag cloud. I figure that a tag cloud would be quite cool for the site being that I blog about so many different things to highlight the main topics.

So the Baby-Green Blog is now running on WordPress 2.5, the latest and greatest, and at the same time I’ve added two new things to the blog:

  • Tag Cloud for keyword tracking of the topics being addressed y the blog.
  • StatPress: This excellent little plug-in which I found on the WordPress site gives me statistics for the blog.

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Continuation

Richard Green on

So I thought I’d blog a little more to finish off what I was writing last night before I was rudely interuptted by Nicky wanting sleep: I suppose I can let her off, but only because she’s pregnant.

Quite convienient that I choose to blog some more today, becuase dearest Mr Zuchini uploaded all the images of his from the weekend to his PhotoBucket account, and decided to tag me in some of the pictures on Facebook, so anyone who’s in my friends list on Facebook can see all the images in the gallery if they like.

For those of you without access to my Facebook account, I’ve added one of the images from the lot to this blog, assuming you can see, you’ll see a nice picture of me and Fruity walking down the road like some kind of couple…not that we are…honest.

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