I can finally say that the Flightblog WordPress theme is all my doing. The overall design hasn’t changed much from the previous version, but the CSS style sheet is all new and all clean.

My previous theme was based on the classic Kubrick WordPress theme and modified (or more like tortured) into the design idea that I held in my pointy, little head. Needless to say, there was a significant amount of less-then-standard CSS holding that theme together.

I took that tortured mutant, made sure that every template had the tags I wanted and then removed every last remnant of CSS. From this blank canvas I reorganized my style sheet and made it more efficient (I hope) and was successful in eliminating the needless one-off CSS objects that had previously haunted this blog. This better, simpler organization will help with any future updates or fixes.

The new design is the fixed three column “Holy Grail” layout. There are a number of iterations of this layout available on the web that I tried but kept coming back to the three column CSS layout create by Antonio Lupettiat at woork.blogspot.com. In fact there is a ton of helpful info at Antonio’s blog from CSS to Ajax. Well worth checking out.

At nearly the same time that I completed this new theme I also installed the first release candidate of WordPress 2.5. The new control panel design is from Jeffrey Zeldman (Happy Cog and A List Apart). Sneak peek here.

A List Apart was another very useful source of ideas for this new theme design. I can remember reading Zeldman’s “blog” way back when the blink tag was still in style. Zeldman and his cronies are the experts when it comes web standards and his blog is a great source of design articles.

It took a few hours of hacking around before I understood how WordPress works. The documentation is great and everything needed for building a theme can be found at the WordPress Codex.

A lot of work for a custom theme when most of my traffic comes from Feedburner or Google Reader…Oh well, maybe my mom will like it.

Installing the latest version of WordPress 2.3 today is a little like Christmas. There’s a new upgrade plugin notifier (I was just notified to upgrade Akismet to 2.0.2), built in Tagging (something I haven’t ever played with) and a ton of bug fixes. I also like to think things are running a little faster too.

You can read all about the WordPress goodness it here.

Upgrading is also the only time I manage to get a complete backup of source code and data. I have several other apps running on my server and there’s a daily cron job dumping all databases and ftping them to another “server” in my home office. However, there’s something satisfying about a manual dump through phpMyAdmin.

Something I’ve been wanting to test is Subversion to keep my WordPress release up to date. Seems straight forward and kinda cool.

One warning, there are a number of plugins that aren’t ready for version 2.3 so make sure yours are tested and ready before you upgrade. Here’s a complete list.

I don’t use very may Wordpress plugins (2 down from 3), however the ones that I do use I highly recommend.

Share This

Nothing is more distracting and tacky then 3 dozen icons for social bookmarking sites littered all over a blog.

Enter the Wordpress plugin Share This from the coding wizard Alex King. Share This hides all those unsightly bookmarking icons behind one icon.

It’s a simple Wordpress plugin to install and configure and Alex has a several other cool Wordpress Plugins so if you like em make small donation to his PayPal account.

Akismet

After having accidentally deleting several legit posts (sorry Even, Brent) when removing the several hundred comment and trackback spams I finally broke down and installed Akismet.

Should have done it years ago.

Weather Icon (honorable mention)

My old design utilized the Weather Icon plugin but it didn’t make the cut in the new design. Don’t think anyone really cared about the weather at Sanford airport. A nice little plugin.

WP-Cache (needed only for high, high traffic blogs)

If your blog gets slashdotted you might need this plugin but don’t look for any real performance increase otherwise. I saw a bigger performance boost tweaking MySQL then I did installing and configuring WP-Cache2.

Now if I happen to snap an aerial photo of an alien abduction and get digged, then I might see need for this plugin.

There is a plugin for just about everything in Wordpress and this is a powerful feature, however plugins can drag down server performance and, IMHO, add unnecessary calls to MySQL.

Google Analytics didn’t make the cut in this new design either. After not checking Google Analytics in several months it got the boot. This is a blog, not an e-commerce site and I feel like I get more then enough traffic info from a well written Apache conf and Urchin. Plus I’m sure I can tap a local Apache pro if needed.