Benjamin Hourigan

In the absence of genuine content updates, the long-overdue announcement that this site no longer uses WordPress 2.5 or K2, but is now on WordPress 2.6 and a new theme.

I spent several weeks looking for a new base theme for my Wordpress sites, and I finally settled on Freshy. Paired with the aptly named Customize plugin, it’s highly and easily customizable. I’ve had a lot of favorable comments from friends on how professional the theme looks. Kudos to designer Julien De Luca.

19 August 2008. A new version of Customize is out that restores widget reordering and fixes other admin interface bugs. There is also a new version of Freshy out (2.0.8), but I haven’t had a chance to try it yet. I’m almost ready to say Freshy users are okay to try upgrading to WP 2.6 (or even 2.6.1, the current version, which I’m now running), but will test the new version of the theme first.

18 August 2008. There are problems with the interaction between Customize (current version, 1.0.2) and WordPress 2.6 that can break some features of your admin interface, particularly the ability to reorder widgets by dragging. Freshy users should hold off upgrading to WordPress 2.6.

With this blog having been out of action so long, there’s a lot of upgrading to do. I’ve upgraded to Wordpress 2.5, and to K2 RC6, losing my custom CSS and header image of the Melbourne skyline in the process. Expect to see some of it back soon.

Update 23 August 2006: I’m back to K2 Beta Two, since 0.9 was messing up the formatting of static pages by putting

tags around them. Here’s hoping the next version won’t include problems I don’t know how to fix.

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Tonight I updated this site’s theme to the latest beta of the wonderful K2 blogging platform. I’ve managed to keep the page layout mostly the same, but the body text style isn’t quite the same. I hope to get it back to the way it was in the next few days, but without EditCSS working in the Firefox 2.0 Beta I use, what am I to do? Though I don’t know that much about CSS, I’ll just have to dive into the stylesheets with an editor and switch things around until I get it right.

I’ve fixed most of the havoc caused by relocating the site, but I’m sure to have missed some garbage text where a few particular unicode characters used to be.

More significantly, the site has had a redesign making use of the K2 template from Binary Bonsai. It look surprisingly professional now, with a lot of superfluous content in the sidebars moved to static pages or cut completely. Google Adsense is now much more pervasive, but also less intrusive. Expect some smaller tweaks in the future, but for now I’m quite happy with how the site is looking.

Some of the static pages linked in the tab bar, especially “Work”, have had quite an overhaul, so don’t forget to check them out.

Now it’s back to business as usual. More to come…

The site is now up and running at its new home at Mediatemple. Several things got broken in the migration process, including, it seems, the text encoding. Please be patient while I put things back in order, with an improved, K2-based layout.

On the 5th of January, this site’s server went down without warning. When it came back up again on the 6th of January, it had been rolled back to a backup from over a week old. I lost about a week’s worth of posts, and my upgrade to WP 2.0 and K2. My host’s admin didn’t inform me about this at all, and even after an inquiry, I still have not received an explanation. This was just the worst and most recent of many problems I’ve had with my host, Worldsuperhost, and I’m now in the process of moving the site to a new server at Mediatemple. There won’t be any more posts until this process is complete. Worldsuperhost, you just lost yourself a customer.