Up the Tree

So, I’ve decided that my current website look, while totally sufficient, needs some updating. That being said, the first order of business is to find Themes worth installing. This may seem like an easy place to start, but I would wager that 99% of Wordpress Themes are absolutely dreadful, or based on the superb work of Michael Helleman’s Kubrick theme.

I will use this post to track all the very best themes in one place, so I don’t have to start from scratch each time I want to plan a relaunch.

Continue reading The Best Wordpress Themes (An ongoing list) »

!(left photo)http://www.upthetree.com/wp-uploads/charts.png(chart)!:http://a.wholelottanothing.org/fitlog/ At “A Whole Lotta Nothing”:http://a.wholelottanothing.org/ there is a great little article and link “Using peer pressure to your benefit”:http://a.wholelottanothing.org/2005/04/using_peer_pres.html whereby the author plans to harness the peer-pressure of blogging to “loose wieght.”:http://a.wholelottanothing.org/fitlog/ Albeit a seemingly innocuous use of the blogging community, it marks a real breakthrough in harnessing the _power of the blog._ The coolest part about the whole thing is that using WordPress’ custom fields a custom graph is created automatically thanks to a very neat little chart add on called “PHP/SWF Charts.”:http://www.maani.us/charts/index.php

This sort of idea could definitely be harnessed for events like the _Aids Walk_ or _Race for the Cure._ It could of course also be used for my fat ass.

(via “Photo Matt”:http://photomatt.net/)

The Iconfactory has just released a new set of swank iPod icons that you can’t help but want to stick on Yo’ Pod. The set features all the newest iPods, iPod minis, and the iPod Shuffle. Pick up your set today and color your iPod fabulous.

Did I mention they’re free?

It seems that my RSS feed had gone all broken because of some poking around I did with the code. Let this teach you PodCasters out there not to mess with your code when you’re tired. The RSS feed has been restored to it’s former glory and I gratefully thank _Aging Geek_ for pointing the problem out. Who knows how many folks have gone without rocking tunes overnight.

*How will I ever forgive myself?!*

In other news I now have an accurate running approximation of how many subscribers now subscribe to my podcast from the friendly folks over at “LibSyn”:http://www.libsyn.com/ who now host some of my episodes. _Although my screwed up RSS feed may have stunted those stats!_ I’ve switched the hosting part of my podcasts to their service because last month I went way over my usual bandwidth counts and decided it’s better to be safe than sorry. You can find the running tally in my right-hand column.

And finally, many thanks to people visiting the site for their comments about the new design. It makes all those lonely nights staring at a flickering screen in my boxer-shorts worth while.

Well if the new design wasn’t a dead give away, Up the Tree has been upgraded to a new piece of blogging software. Although the move seems to have gone successfully, I am sure there may be a few hiccups - so if you see anything out of the ordinary please give me a holler.

My new weblogging software, “WordPress,”:http://wordpress.org/ while superior in many ways to my old blogging software, “MovableType,”:http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ has one major downfall… every page that WordPress creates is dynamically created and must be a PHP file. This seemingly harmless caveat means that all my old static pages must be renamed or reorganized. This doesn’t bother me particularly, because I can always keep all my old weblog files in the background, but more I am worried about my RSS feeds which had been simply named *index.xml.*

*The .xml thing doesn’t work with WordPress.*

The only fix I can find right now is to create a redirect for my index.xml file which would load my new RSS feed location. The only problem with this approach is that the browser address actually changes with a redirect which I would assume might create a problem with some RSS readers. Does anybody have a better solution? One that would be completely transparent?

_Thanks for listening to my techno-jumble, I promise not to be as dorky in future._