I upgraded this site to WordPress 2.3.3 and changed the theme to veryplaintext, which is the cleanest looking theme that supports widgets. I will probably add a bit of color to the sidebar and make a few tweaks later.
WordPress
Manage a WordPress blog from your phone
The WPhone plugin adds a nice mobile admin interface for WordPress. A Rich version works on the iPhone or other phones that support AJAX, while the Lite version will work on any phone.
Site Problems
As some of you may have noticed, this site was having 500 internal server errors earlier this evening. WordPress was running out of memory, and it seemed to be plugin related. I moved all of the plugins out of the plugin folder and it started working again. By reinstalling plugins one at a time I was able to isolate the problem.
It turned out to be Alex King’s Twitter Tools. When I tried to enable it in the plugin page, WordPress reported a fatal error and didn’t enable it. I tried a different Twitter plugin, which seemed to work until got the same error when I published this post and it tried to send a tweet, The real problem was that somehow the PHP version reverted to 4.4.7 instead of 5.2.2 in Dreamhost’s domain control panel. Changing it back to 5.2.2 corrected the problem.
A new look for MacMegasite
I switched to a new theme & logo at MacMegasite, and I also de-cluttered the sidebars. I’m still looking at more themes and working on the logo, so I may still change it if I find something I like better.
The last few days I’ve looked at a lot of WordPress & Drupal themes. Almost none of them are truly ‘ready to go’. I always find little bugs such as misaligned list items or conflicts with various modules. I also found that many of the WordPress themes that claim to be widget-ready really aren’t.
WordPress 2.3
I just upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.3 using Subversion. The upgrade was quick and painless, except for an interaction with my server configuration which caused an endless redirect loop. I have my server configured to strip off ‘www’ from the URL, but I had the URL listed as ‘www.mcdevzone.com’ in the blog configuration. Changing it to ‘mcdevzone.com’ in the blog configuration fixed the problem.
iPhone theme
I’ve installed the iWPhone plugin & theme from ContentRobot, which reformats the page when viewed on an iPhone.
Switched to Subversion
Since DreamHost still doesn’t have the important WordPress 2.2.1 security update available for One-click, I switched to Subversion for upgrades. Thanks to carpeaqua for the pointer.
Upgraded to WordPress 2.2
I’ve upgraded this site to WordPress 2.2 using DreamHost’s one-click installer. Nothing broke – all of my plugins and themes still work. It now uses the built-in widget feature instead of the sidebar widgets plugin.
WordPress 2.2
WordPress 2.2 was released today! I’ll probably try it out on one of my machines this weekend before I decide whether to update this site.
New Theme
As you probably notice, I made a slight change to the theme for this site. I’ve been using the Barthelme theme, which I also use at XpressLinux.com, because I like the clean design. However I didn’t want this site to look exactly like XpressLinux.com so I made a slight change to the CSS.
Note the narrow band of colors at the top of the header. Those particular colors have a special significance; read about it here.