www.blueballoon.co.uk

Testing trackbacks with George’s website

It might be useful one day…

This is a test post to demonstrate how to use the SlideShow Pro flash slide show control.

And then just a regular image.

What a bongo beauty!

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

I’ve just written my first wordpress template.  You can see it in action on George’s new vegan blog www.animalsnotingredients.co.uk.

I’m pretty happy with my html and css, but most of my coding has been done in the java world, so the switch to php has been interesting.  I used to have java blogging software pebble installed ages ago, but never really got into it.  When George said she wanted to set up a blog, I thought I’d follow the crowd and try wordpress.  Now that I’ve got a reasonable linux webserver running, wordpress has been a breeze to install.  I found the WP Themer Kit and it’s proved really useful in setting up George’s site.  Once I’ve properly finished it off, and tidied it up, I might make it available if anyone’s interested.  Then I’ll get on and theme my own site…

So it turns out it was FreeBSD all along.

Following some of the problems I’d had with my wife’s blog I decided to reinstall the web server in our data centre (the kitchen). I eventually got Centos installed, which after some playing with the BIOS and network card was much easier to configure. Using Yum is much easier than installing software from BSD’s ports system.

I guess that just made it easier to get the right versions of all the dependencies installed and now wordpress works like a charm.

So after being completely impressed with wordpress on days one and two, day three provided me with a bug.  I was unable to add any categories (would complete the form, hit submit and nothing would happen).  It’s obviously a problem with ome crazy javascript, as turning that off in firefox allowed me to add categories.  If I turn the js back on, I can still use the categories as you would expect.  So there’s a little tip…

I messed about with Expression Engine for a bit and it was alright, but I thought I’d look into wordpress and it’s bloody smart, I can tell you. I’ve installed it - twice (see Mrs W’s blog - www.purplepetal.co.uk), downloaded and customised a template and seem to be ready to rock.

I’ll try to post more regularly than I did before, buy we’ll see how it goes.