I must be nuts!
It’s either something about the blogging software that I use: Wordpress or something about my personality that triggered me over the past 24 hours to turn the blog inside out, back to front and whichever way around. As if I haven’t got better things to do with my time.
The thing is (justification) I was never happy with the layout that I came up with a couple of months back. At the time I settled for the Default or Kubrick Wordpress theme - mainly because I found one plugin that allowed me to display photo(s) from my online album which I was never able to get working in any other theme.
Last night at 9:30pm I made a decision to ditch Kubrick in favour of the K2 theme, basically an update of the Kubrick theme and in my view a much more aesthetically pleasing layout. The new layout therefore does not show any photos - the stats would suggest that few folks (if any) were actually clicking on the albums link and viewing photos in this fashion. So why have something that’s not being used?
There’s an incredible array of tools and extras for Wordpress, commonly known as plugins or widgets and it’s easy as piss to get carried away with adding one extra after another. In the end what’s important to me is to present a simple yet effective layout of the blog. I feel that this has now been achieved with the K2 theme.
By the way, you can still view my online albums, from the blog, by following the link at the top of the page - not surprisingly called: Photos.
And I didn’t stop there… I ended up stripping back quite a few items from the right hand column. The other thing I decided on was to disable user registration. Again - why have something that’s not being used by the readers - in the four years that I’ve been maintaining this blog - there have only been two folks that have ever registered! So User Registration gone!
Besides, comments can be left by anyone - you basically don’t have to register to leave a comment. The only reason why one would enable user registration is if one wanted other folks to contribute articles to the blog - something which I have no intention of doing as the blog is my own account and sharing. Interestingly, the only users that have registered over the past few months have been “bots” - critters that crawl the Internet - basically, collecting, scraping and prying into webs pages.
Over the net couple of days, I plan on prettying up the header a little and a nice thing about the K2 theme is the facility to enable random images. This means that each time you come back to the blog you will presented with a different image at the top of the screen. Once this is done I think I might leave things alone (so to speak) and get on with other - more important and productive - tasks.
But then again - it is Wordpress and I’m stuck with a personality that loves to fiddle with all things cyberwise. Let me tell you my idea of nirvana… a fast internet link, plenty of privacy and a cupboard full weetbix, local honey and milk of course!
And then there was Ajax!











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