While checking out Google Trends today I learned that Tiger Woods may have farted, Screech isn’t in People Magazine’s cover photo, Bill Clinton is in North Korea negotiating the release of two American journalists, and Ashton Kutcher posted to twitpic a photo of Demi Moore’s butt.

Google Trends: "tiger woods farts" is on fire

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blog · google trends · keywords · popular · statistics · topic

WordPress 2.5 won .net magazine‘s Open source application of the year for 2009 (issue 184). WordPress is an awesome blogging platform and CMS. It deserves all the accolades it receives.

Version 2.7 is better yet (I upgraded three blogs in the past day). Thanks a bunch, Matt. And congratulations.

.net · 2009 · award · blog · cms · programming · wordpress

Kirsten wants to write more personal and edgy blog posts than are really suited to our family blog, Danley.org, so she asked me to help her set up her own. I had set up a blog for her a year ago but she never even made the initial post. Regardless, I was thrilled at her suggestion. I love to read her writings and I think it’s a healthy exercise.

I dropped the tables from her database and wiped the old WordPress files from the web server then installed the latest version of WordPress. It took less than five minutes. Then I had her select a theme we could customize to her liking. She chose metamorph_DNA for its simplicity, feature set, and strength of styles. I told her it would be no problem to pinkify the colors and shrink the header.

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blog · cogitations · customize · kirsten · theme · wordpress

The Rhetoric is Gravatar enabled, which means your gravatar will show up next to your comments. Pretty cool, eh?

If you don’t have a gravatar go to http://en.gravatar.com/ and sign up for free. You’ll upload your avatar for each email address with which you blog, set a rating for each and voila!, you’re done. Gravatar enabled sites will search for your nifty little image and place it neatly next to your very interesting comment.

WordPress.org: Using Gravatars

avatar · blog · comment · gravatar · how-to

Danley.org is now up and running! Check it out. We plan to have weekly posting assignments for the girls. It will be a place for Kirsten and the girls and I to post pictures, videos, stories, drawings, recipes and all manner of neat things about and by our little family.

Add the feed to your favorite aggregator now.

blog · danley · danley.org · family

The Rhetoric uses the WordPress CMS as it’s blogging engine. Until yesterday it was on version 2.1. I’ve intended to upgrade for some time to take advantage of the new features, themes, widgets and overall ease of use. Yesterday was the day.

The Rhetoric is now running on WordPress version 2.6.3.

I chose the iNove 1.0.3 theme for it’s simplicity and power. I don’t know if it will stay, but so far I like it. I’m just kicking the tyres for now. I’ll continue to configure it a bit more. Suggestions are always welcome. Please leave a comment.

The upgrade process itself couldn’t have been more simple. I backed up the MySQL database, backed up the files, deleted the old files, downloaded the new files and copied them over to the web server, ran the upgrade utility and installed this new theme. None of it was complicated and I had zero issues. Backing up the files was by far the most time-consuming part. The complete upgrade took no more than twenty minutes.

I hope you like the changes as much as I do.

blog · cms · wordpress