Spurred by my coworkers recent entry, or reentry, to the blogosphere I decided to do a little updating of my own. For a while now I’ve been wanting a cleaner, easier to extend interface that was more targetted for reading, rather than navigation all around in ways that will generate the most ad revenue. This led me to Warpspires Hemingway theme for WordPress. Basically it’s as simple as it can be, but it’s a good starting point for extending without having to learn the entire K2 Theme. What I was looking for was pretty simple actually. A theme that would be more vertical than column based, something where the information about each post, as well as related posts, could be displayed off to the side, and something that loads fast. It’s going to take some design time to do what I want with the rest of it, and to clean up past tags/categories, but the HTML blocks are all there. If anyone has any suggestions on feel free to call them out. Hopefully by this weekend the design will be well on it’s way.

Talking with someone from work today about my webhost had me investigating some of the many features that have gone unused on my account. They have great support — either through tickets or their wiki, subversion wherever and whenever you want, the ability to one click install loads of things, you can install trac, Ruby On Rails and just about anything you could ever want. To be honest, they support everything I want with one glaringly obvious exception — Coldfusion. I just noticed though they have a “Suggestions” section in their control panel (Home > Suggestions) where members can vote on features to implement. If you’re a Dreamhost customer, vote for it! Unfortunately it’s been on the suggestions list since 2004 so I’m not expecting much; but hey it won’t hurt to vote it up! I also added my votes for some other cool things like one click trac install and a handful of other interesting sounding features.

Dreamhost has been amazing so far, which makes me stay a loyal customer. There aren’t too many services online I can say that I pay for, which means they offer some great services. I am anxiously awaiting when MediaTemplate offers more than just a tease of their ColdFusion services, as the rest of their setup looks very impressive. I’m still looking for a ColdFusion host though, so if you have any suggestions please let me know. The only real requirements I have are CF 7 (hopefully upgrading to 8 when it comes out), apache and multiple domains.

Note: If you want to sign up with Dreamhost and want a full discount, you can use the promo code fortuna_waived which gives as much money off as possible ($97 if you order the 1yr plans). In other words I don’t make anything and you get full discount. Your second year will be full price I believe. Only thing you have to do if you sign up with this is vote for ColdFusion.

The hardest thing to work is almost always your weakness. My weakness has historically been design where I end up wasting countless hours trying to do something relatively simple to have it come out looking, well, not so great. This is the kind of thing that I’d happily pay (reasonably) to come up with a solution I could live with. For site layouts that could mean finding a great layout on a free site such as Open Source Web Design, buying a coded layout from the millions of template sites like Template Monster, buying a unique layout from a forum, hiring a designer or having a design contest. To me any of these are better than doing it myself in the end. Although the technical knowledge isn’t incredibly hard to grasp the code of a layout, getting everything just right is a skill I just do not have, which is why I decided to go with an already coded template for the redesign of AdamFortuna.com.

It was finally time to upgrade to WordPress 2.1.2 while at it as well. Since I host at Dreamhost, this was easier than easy. They have a growing set of “One Click Installers” in the revamped control panel, which also manage which version of each software you’re using. Upgrading was as easy as clicking here, jumping to the wordpress install script to do the database updates, and crossing my fingers. Although I had backups at hand, it worked without a glitch. My themes were transferred, my plugins continued to work, it was shockingly easy. A few plugins didn’t work right off though, such as the coding markup when posting which disappeared, but the major plugins continued to function such as a tag warrior, MicroID, OpenID, Google Analytics and Feed Burner redirect. Hopefully that’s the last of the upgrade problems for now though.