So, he we are, and entirely new look at feel to a web site. It is a little short on content right now, but that’s easy to drop in. The important point is that the site was up and running, and looking rather impressive, in an evening. Most of that time was spent selecting a theme, uploading files, and watching the Giants beat the Padres in extra innings (yay!). The amount of actual web coding was minimal. Like I said, probably an hour or so.

Of course no WordPress theme is ideal. I spent a lot of time looking at nice designs but eventually went with one that was fairly simple but supported all of the latest tweaks to the WordPress software. It is also worth noting that I’ll probably now spend a long time tweaking the design to be just how I want it. Finally, the one downside of running a web site on a PHP/mySQL backend is that it really helps if you have a basic knowledge of databases and a copy of phpMyAdmin that you can use to keep an eye on things. This is particularly useful in fighting comment spam (Emerald City has had over 3000 items of comment spam in the last week.)

I should also note that, with the profusion of browsers out there, it is hard to know is any CSS-based site is going to work for everyone. If you see weird stuff, let me know.

In case there are any WordPress geeks out there, a few more techie comments are hidden under the fold.

One of the reasons I chose this theme is that it has support for Widgets. I like sidebar stuff, and Widgets seem to be a good way of managing that material. So far so good, except that the formatting doesn’t seem to work on the links. The designer of the theme says this is a problem with the widget code, not the theme. I haven’t had time to take a look yet.

More generally I think that the widget elements should be a little more configurable. But that’s down to me if I actually want to spend the time writing the extensions.

I’m planning to use this site to learn a lot more about WordPress development, so if you are interested stick around. I suspect one of the first things I may write is a simple plugin to automatically turn off comments on posts more than a week or two old. The comment spammers seem happy to scatter post over the entire blog, so blocking comments totally from old posts seems like a good way to deal with a lot of the nonsense. I can do this in phpMyAdmin, of course, but a lot of the point of writing software is to automate things that are boring and repetitive.