Moonlit Minds

I managed – following instructions from WordPress Codex site here, I manged few minutes ago to upgrade this humble “bloggie” of mine.

The upgrade was painless and relatively quick. My host, one.com , worked without the glitch – big thank you to One!

Everything seems to work so far. What’s next than? Well, I suppose that it’s the time to play with the new Hybrid theme, based on Hybrid theme framework  Child Theme – “Old School”.  It looks quite amazing (especially “under the hood”) but – it will take some time for me to adjust it to my vision of the site (a bit “gloomy”, greyish, personal blog). Anyway, new version of software deserves “new clothes”  .

My first impressions of WordPress 2.7? It’s great – I like new administration interface a lot. It seems much more “user friendly” and the overall look suites my taste. I also hope that the new feature – automatic upgrade – will work in the future. Not that the upgrade was too complex or difficult. It was just… stressful.

And as the last note – apologies to myself and others who visit occasionally my place here. I did not update Moonlit Minds lately because of few reasons. One of them being learning how to use social web applications like FriendFeed and Twitter (yes, it takes some time…) another – being busy with real life matters.

I hope to share some of the things I’ve learned about “social web” in the near future. Perhaps my sharing my experince and mistakes will help some other people who, as me, are new to this stuff.

I wish everybody nice day (remember: weekend soon!)

This is how (I spotted it yesterday while browsing the ThemeHybrid site):

October 14th, 2008 WordPress

Club memberships at Theme Hybrid for $10

And I can tell you – it is a bargain! Great offer – just check yourself! According to me, the membership is worth more and I was thinking of becoming a member for quite some time. The only reason I did not join Theme Club on Hybrid site earlier is that I was not convinced if I will blog here for a longer time (amount of time and effort needed for it – do I have it? or rather – will I have it still?). But Justin Tadlock’ s offer was too good to resist. This offer + my “aforementioned catastrophe” = new Theme Club member.

Check yourself – among other things you will be able to acquire this Child Theme:

I just downloaded it yesterday – and I have to tell you – it is beautiful. I just have to change the header (read it: spend some time playing in Gimp) – and you will see it here, on my site.

But it’s not only about what you can “get” for your money – it is mainly about supportng good cause. If you want Justin (and also other WordPress designers) to create those pieces of art – well, I think you should join their clubs. At least this is my meaning. And this is how Open Source works…

I decided to write a little bit about the theme I am currently running on the blog – not because it lacks documentation – it has splendid one at ThemeHybrid site, but because I would like to share my perspective – the perspective of a new to WordPress.org user.

The most important for me in this theme are following features:

1. It has (nomen omen ) options page or – settings – it means you can easily configure some vital functions of your blog (more about it below) .
2. It has Home page. Yes, it is very important if you would like to transform your WordPress CMS from blog to Website.
3. It has Child Themes – actually it comes with 3 (!) different looks in the pack (blue, grey and beige – all very nice). You can also, as member of Theme Club, download one more theme – Good & Evil – which I chosen on this blog.
4. Options being Parent Theme can be easily upgraded without you loosing your small “tweaks”.
5. The Theme comes preloaded with many other interesting features like inserting thumbnails into the posts and few Page Templates.
6. It has fantastic navigation.
7. One can “easily” add new functions by editing functions.php file – well, this is not really easy – but possible – and even I could do it by following the manual written by Justin Tadlock HERE.
8. It has splendid look – and I write here not about the colours but about typography.

One can in relatively easy way transform WordPress blog into the centre of your “Internet life” – create your own personal or professional place on the web. Options “plays well” with most of plug-ins but honestly speaking – you will not need many additional.

So, it finally happened – my dear, modest blog – clothed with Thematic theme by Ian Stewart – “exploded” on me. Well – it did not literally explode – it simply disappeared – together with the content.

Sad…

I spent whole night trying to recover the thing – but, shortly speaking, I did not manage. (I have a backup of a few first posts from September but not the last ones).

Why did it happened? He, he – my own fault – I was “tinkering” too much and experimenting with some plug-ins and themes. The poor, old blog did not obviously stand this amount of ill-directed “creativity”.

I strongly believe though that all events – especially of the aforementioned kind, have an aim. My “mini-catastrophe” made me thinking. Perhaps I was going the wrong way…? Well, certainly, I was! The thing I know a bit about is how to write and present things, which eventually become interesting for some people. It is definitely too early for me to write my own style sheets or PHP functions.I should rather keep for a while easier (from the user point of view!) blog theme.

I also realized that I need some kind of support – just like I had while starting with Linux (3 years ago) – and nothing beats the support one can get from the forum (Ubuntu, Arch, Sidux). That’s why I decided to try Options Theme right now – it has marvellous documentation and – you can browse forum on the ThemeHybrid site. Not mentioning the quality of the theme – splendid, a lot of pre-built functions and possibilities.

But Options is another subject – I feel obliged to write about this piece of software next time and a bit more than just few sentences.