At first, I was thinking to just scrap the ol’ blog, but then I figured that I might give it one last try. But instead of duplicating what’s already happening on the social networking sites, I am simplifying philomyth.us back down to the basics of blogging. I still haven’t decided what I’ll be posting, but I am leaning towards more long-form open-to-the-public articles that need a home.

Design-wise, I went with Yoko, an HTML5 theme which is more adaptable to different screen presentations (monitor, mobile or tablet). I got rid of most of the extra social widgets. But I included some social links in case people wanted to use them.

Over this period of time, WordPress has also been updated to version 3.3 with greater usability on the front and back-end.

Here’s hoping that this cleaned up direction will lead to some more actual blogging in the year to come.

After complaining for over a year about IX Web Hosting, I finally got off my butt and did something about it. Over the course of a couple of months, I have consolidated most of my domains over to GoDaddy and have transferred all my blogs over to DreamHost. I am hoping that this serves as a more reliable and stable setup than IX, which had constant security and stability problems.

Of course, all these changes are in the background, so if it worked (unlike last time), you guys shouldn’t notice anything except hopefully faster load times and perhaps less downtime.

Here’s a list of reminder notes for the next time:

• One-click Installs are cool, except when they forget to tell you that they use customized database prefixes which don’t match previously backed-up database pointers.
• Mirrored domain pointers and temporary database hostnames are helpful in transition but have to remember to clean them up and not leave any broken “links” once you go live.
• Webshell on IX turned out to be a blessing, saved time on backing up the complete blog directories.
• Apps used: Filezilla for FTP and PSPad for code editing.

Time for another design update for the ol’ blog. It’s been almost 2 years since the last makeover, which along with less frequent blog posts is a likely result of increased facebook / twitter usage.

WordPress, the back-end to this site, has made some significant progress and is now at version 2.8.x. The developers and community have done a great job making it more user-friendly in posting, managing and maintaining. Version updates are now one-click as well as plugin installs and updates. No more fiddling around with zip files and FTP.

For this latest re-design, I went with a theme called Carrington that I’ve been keeping an eye on and wanting to learn more about. It is developed as a complete CMS theme framework, which is way beyond what I need, but interesting to look into (at least for me).

The layout of the front page is pretty similar to the previous version. The biggest change is moving the moblog pics to the top bar. I have also jazzed up the Archives page to make it more visual.

There are more changes to the secondary pages due to the new theme, such as Tag, Category and Date Archive pages, which can be accessed in the sidebar. And partly with the new theme, I have made some of the page elements context sensitive depending on what type of pages you are on. For example, when you are on a post page, you can see a list of Related Posts in the sidebar, along with the clutter of front page badges hidden.

So far, this re-design looks to be pretty functional and stable. As always, if you see something that isn’t working, please let me know.

P.S. I meant to publish this post last week, but I got distracted trying to do some integration of posts and comments with Facebook, but the coding is just not quite there yet as a workable solution.

It’s been nearly five months since I last made any significant programming and design changes to philomyth.us. As before, there were some security and programming upgrades for the underlying wordpress site software. And also, since toying with Facebook, I found some features that I could share across platforms.

I also took the opportunity to overhaul the theme design since I never could get the previous theme to work properly in Internet Explorer [get firefox] and the previous theme was also somewhat cumbersome so that I couldn’t easily make changes without having to re-learn the entire setup. I ended up choosing a theme called Cleaker 2.1, which after some customizations and modifications, I am very happy with.

Lastly, I updated the plugins (or add-ons), “out with the old in with the new”. Here’s a list of the plugins that I am running currently:

• A Different Monthly Archive Script: posting calendar
• Akismet: comment spam
• Brian’s Latest Comments: comment listing
• flickrRSS: flickr photostream
• Samsarin PHP Widget: php coded widgets
• SparkStats: posting graph
• SRG Clean Archives: post archives
• Subscribe2: email subscriptions
• Subscribe To Comments: comment notification
• Time Zone: daylight savings time adjustment
• Ultimate Tag Warrior: post tags
• Wordbook: facebook crossposting
• WordPress.com Stats: site traffic
• WordPress Database Backup: automatic backups
• WordPress PDA: mobile-friendly site
• WP AJAX Edit Comments: comment editing

As I mentioned earlier, I replaced a couple of plugins with ones that could be shared with Facebook:

• Now Reading -> GoodReads
• Movie Ratings -> Flixster

With any major site revisions, if you see anything that isn’t working quite right, please let me know in the comments.

It’s been a while since I worked on this site and my posting frequency seems to have slowed down a bit as well. After receiving a notice that there was a security update for my blogging software, WordPress, I figured it was time to make some minor updates and tweaks. Most of the changes are in the backend, but there are some new or updated features and functionality:

• updated WordPress to 2.1.3
• updated and cleaned up WordPress plugins.
  (most notably, Now Reading list has been cleaned up and formatted with a complete book archive.)
• added a Movie Review plugin which can be seen in the sidebar and also has its own movie ratings archive. I still have to input movies into the list and review them, but that’ll happen over time.
• added a mobile photoblog in the sidebar for pictures that I take from my phone throughout the day.

I tried updating my theme, but it turned out to be too much work. And after having not worked on my theme for a while, I had forgotten all the little customizations that go into it. From now on, I’ll only change my theme when there is a major wordpress engine update.

I might make some more minor changes to touch things up, but that should be most of it for now. Hopefully, now that I’ve gotten my site to a point where I’m happy with the design, I’ll be more motivated to post. Here’s to hoping.

I have been wanting to try a three column theme for this site to hopefully improve readability and usefulness. And now I’ve finally gone and done it. I tried out a couple of different themes and styles before finally settling on 3ColumnK2. It took a bit of squeezing and modifying to get the theme down to the size and look that I wanted, and now I can say that I am quite pleased with the results.

Please let me know if you see anything that might be broken or doesn’t look right.

(for those of you still using IE, I have tried my best to make the layout work. But if it still doesn’t look right, my solution / suggestion is that you make life better for yourself and everyone else by immediately installing Firefox. [end rant])

I have been wanting to find a way to consolidate the different comments that I make around the web at different blogs or forums, and I came upon this web service called coComment, which does exactly that. It allows me to keep track of my comments (through a firefox extension) and view them all together in a running report. The other nice thing for my own blog is that I can also display the most recent comments that I have made in my sidebar on the right (on the main page).

I have also made the comments on philomyth.us compatible with coComment, so that if you want to use it yourself, you can track your own coComments here as well. Actually, coComment has some other useful features, but these are the ones that I found most interesting and beneficial.

After running ER-Fans for a couple of weeks, I ran into some ftp problems with IX and got them sorted out with their technical support in a reasonably quick response time. So I decided to test out a move for philomyth.us, with the hosting contract expiring in December (can’t believe it’s already been a year, more on that in a later post).

After transferring all the files and setting up the database, I ran into minor import problems with the database tables (the wordpress database plugin caused some errors), which I was able to fix with some manual manipulation. Aside from that, the test ran so smoothly, I couldn’t tell the difference between the old and the new. So I just went ahead and made the switch. I can’t believe it worked that easily…I’m still crossing my fingers, waiting for something to break.

Update 1: When I went to publish this post, I encountered an error. It turns out that it was a bit too good to be true. The site was running off a cache that was transferred over, so when I made changes to the site, the cache went to update, and that’s when I encountered problems. All I had to do was to properly set the permissions, so all is good now, I hope.

Update 2: If anyone is reading now, you’ll notice that the theme has changed back to a default (plain vanilla boring). Something happened with my theme, so I am now in the process of re-installing it. I guess “I spoke too soon” would be an understatement, hehe, then again, I was expecting as much.