gottahavacuppamocha

Well, if you have been around the site awhile, you may have noticed a change or two lately. I finally decided to upgrade to WordPress 2.0, and I couldn’t be more pleased with it. WP has matured a lot over the years, and my guess is it’s at least equal to, and possibly superior to MovableType or other blogging software, IMHO.

Anyway, the new version has lots of bells and whistles for me to try out and tinker with. Some of them were available on the old 1.2 version I was using, but most of them have come into being since WP 1.5. Version 1.5 added loads of new functionality and became the default version used by most plugin and theme developers. I spent most of today adding plugins, many of which you will never see because they deal with admin stuff. Others are thing you will see, but they are more subtle. The site now has nested comments, where you can reply to someone else’s comments. Not really a problem on a low traffic site like this, but it may come in handy in the future. At the very least, it will allow me to reply to comments more directly.

All comments, pingbacks, and trackbacks are sent for moderation. I’ve had some major problems with comment spam, then later with pingback spam. The new version has some powerful tools to combat comment spam, and there are some plugins that should also work, so I may loosen up the comment moderation later, so I don’t have to approve every one.

Of course, you could register to become a “subscriber”. Then your comments should automatically appear. In the past, I kept the login link of the main page because I didn’t want anybody just logging in and writing articles. They could still do that, but now all articles must be approved by an admin or editor (me). If you just want to comment, there is no harm in becoming a subscriber. Don’t worry, there’s no dues or fees, and I hate spam, so I won’t send you any bulk emails.

Random quotes are back. For awhile on an older version of the blog, I had a random quote thingie I hacked up in PHP and MySQL. I put the quotes in the database and a few lines of code would extract a random quote and display it each time the page is refreshed. It was very simple, but not very elegant. Now it’s a simple plugin created. In the old version, I would have to go into PHPMyAdmin to enter quotes. Now I can just enter them from the admin panel. Like most bells and whistles, it’s utility is dubious, but it’s a cool, subtle thing that might brighten someone’s day.

The blog now has a theme switcher, and shortly, it will have quite a few themes. So far, all of them are done by other people, but I will try to work out my own theme in the next few months. If you want to switch a theme, just check the sidebar. You can also check out different WordPress themes here. There are so many cool themes, I don’t have enough space for them all. I have to exercise some will power to keep myself under control. Of course as I write this, I am downloading more themes. As I work on the site and add different plugins, I will have to do some tinkering, because not all plugins/features will work immediately with all themes.

I also downloaded a Google AdSense plugin that’s supposed to be a seamless way to add ads to WordPress sites. I haven’t signed up for the AdSense program yet, but I have been toying with the idea. I don’t get a lot of traffic, but who knows. Maybe in the future.

There are bunch of other things that have changed and will be changing, I can’t even think of them all at the moment. Anyway, most of the changes will be minor and subtle. Some of them might not work. Some of them might even break the site (though I hope not). Anyway, welcome to the new blog.

Related posts:

1. Comment Spam fixed
2. Comments and Spam Karma 2
3. Smoothing wrinkles
4. Spaminated
5. WordPress 2.8 upgrade