The first to go: WPG2. I hardly knew you, but while I did, you were nothing but a pain in the ass. Good bye.

I haven’t decided about the K2 theme yet. There’s potential here — if it’s ever finished. Moreover, changing something as simple as the headline font requires hacking around in CSS. While some people love that stuff, I can think of other things I’d rather do, like stick my hand in a fan.

But what would I replace K2 with? I thought about going back to blog.txt, but it doesn’t render tag clouds correctly. And, 95% of all other themes out either have garish colors, cutesy graphics, or are just plain ugly. So, my search continues.

I’ve already found a couple of issues. The “Advanced Navigation” is broken, so I’ve disabled it — easy to do in K2’s control page. Images wider than the main column aren’t being shrunk down by the CSS either (see this apropos example).

I’m also going to be playing with the WPG2 plugin, so I can integrate my photos into my blog. (WordPress’ new built-in gallery is OK for basic stuff, but not nearly as powerful as Gallery.)

Sigh.

Trying to upload my latest and greatest TF2 glitch pics results in an “HTTP error”:

OK so far…

Bummer, denied! Thank you so much, asshole.

By the way, I had to upload these screenshots by hand with an FTP client.

Update: It looks like the problem was with the Bad Behavior plugin. Upgrading it to the latest version was a snap, and good exercise for 2.5’s automatic plugin upgrade functionality. See this article for more.

This takes you to a page that declares, “Internet Explorer can make your computer unsafe. Why not switch to a browser that’s more secure?”. This button only appears when using WordPress in IE. WTF is that? Although I agree with the general sentiment (though IE 7 is much improved), I find it rather presumptuous for WordPress to be advocating in such a manner.

As the screenshot shows, in the few days that Akismet has been running on this blog, it caught 146 spam comments. There were no false positives, and no spam escaped. Sweet!

TAKE THAT, YOU FUCKING SPAMMERS.

Update 6-15-2007: It turns out that some of those messages were old comments that I had previously marked as spam by hand. Apparently WordPress doesn’t delete comments from the database when they are marked as spam manually. Fortunately, Akismet deletes spam after 15 days so it doesn’t clog the database.

Much later update: Akismet has caught thousands of messages since this original post… yes, Akismet rocks.

Blog.txt is a theme for WordPress designed to impact your content in the most minimal way: using whitespace as a major design element, guiding the reader to the content.

I like the overall effect of this theme. It makes good use of whitespace, which is vastly undervalued by many web designers.

I did have to make a couple of modifications to the stylesheet. The <em> tag was making text bold, and the <strong> tag was making text BOLD AND UPPERCASE. Both of these behaviors are incorrect; they should be italic and bold, respectively. (I still tend to use <i> and <b> for italic and bold anyway, as I don’t buy the “semantics” argument against <i> and <b>. I intuitively know what italicized or bolded text means, and I don’t need another set of tags to provide that concept.)

I also made the Comment field a little wider, as it was about the size of a postage stamp.

I’m debating about the ALL CAPS headlines, but interestingly it does look a bit cleaner than Mixed Case headlines, so I’m going to leave it alone for now.

WordPress 2.2’s Widgets are quite handy. I installed the Folding Pages Widget from Navy Road Software, so that my Contents (actually a listing of WordPress pages) aren’t fully expanded on the home page. WordPress’ built-in Widgets are handling the rest of the sidebar. Much nicer than hand-editing php code!

I may eventually throw a bit of subtle color into the theme, but I don’t want to go overboard and overwhem the “minimalist” feel. I would like to incorporate my previous headline pic, though.