Blog upgrades

Today I’ve done the lions-share of the work to upgrade my 3 blogs. Now, I’m not really sure why I have 3 blogs, other than it helps my different personas log their thoughts in appropriate places. The 3 blogs are:

• blog.exerro.com - a blog that I’ll use when we’re traveling
• blog.nickt.com - a blog for the consulting side of life
• blog.indigoprime.com - this blog, which is a place for everything else

I’ve kept a similar look and feel across all 3, I host them all on Media Temple, which offers a great virtualized service. I’m running Wordpress 2.5 with a mysql backend.

I’ve always liked Kyle Neath’s hemingway theme, but I noticed it didn’t support Wordpress Widgets. It’s possible to hack the template a little to get this working, then I discovered that the NinjaMonkeys had already done this. It saved me a lot of time. Checkout Ninja Monkeys! Theme - Widgetized Hemingway for WordPress 2.2+.

I also added a few plugins:

• akismet - to cut down on comment spam
• uberdose all in one SEO pack
• flickr photo gallery - this is the nicest of the flickr plugins
• google XML sitemaps generator
• WP-OpenID - again, to cut down on comment spam
• Twitter Tools - to enable tweets on my sidebar, courtesy of Denver-based dev Alex King

As we’re off traveling again soon (follow our progress on blog.exerro.com), I’ve also started using Marsedit, to allow us both to blog offline and upload text and images whenever we can connect to a ropey internet connection!