For those interested in following the blunders of other would-be web publishers. Here is a log of wordpress site modifications I made around here.
May 1, 2005. Installed WordPress 1.5 via Fantastico in my server’s control panel. Tried to update to new version 1.5.1.2 but ended up corrupting something. So, re-installed the program via Fantastico and manually corrected the security hole as described at WordPress. By the way, I highly recommend bluehost.com for affordable, powerful web hosting options.
May 5, 2005. Registered some users (versions of myself) to test the system and permissions. Wrote a few posts, like this one.
May 6, 2005. What is a "Blogroll", listed in the sidebar? Blogrolls feature links to friends’ blogs in a sidebar of your own blog. Since I don’t have any friends yet, I hid blogroll listings of users that were myself, by checking Visible=No under Links Management. That left me with no Blogroll at all, which is OK for now, at least until I get some friends.
May 7, 2005. Created a number of WordPress "pages" for 2 purposes: (1) to act as a front page for the different forums on the site, and (2) to display links to static pages on old home site.
May 8, 2005. Create a desired page order for displaying pages by modifying the wp_list_pages code in the theme’s sidebar.php.
May 9, 2005. Reordered the sidebar sections and changed the heading titles by modifying the file sidebar.php in the theme used in my WordPress installation. This needs to be done for each new theme incorporated as a default theme. Note to self. Learn php (see these site for more information:
WordPress.org Theme Development
Urban Giraffe on writing your own WordPress Themes
May 15, 2005. Installed a number of downloadable themes and liked the following for their simplicity: Almost Spring, Desert_Theme, Copacetix, and Green Marinee. Although Green Marinee was my favorite, it has a bug that doesn’t correctly display subcategories. I tried to modify the php code, but gave up after several failures, again resolving to learn php).
May 15, 2005. Installed plugin: Static Front Page (used this to be sure first-time visitors always see the same page (with slug of "home"). This is a "How to…" page for naive non-bloggers coming to this site for the first time. The objective is to get people to move their mouse in a constructive manner, i.e., commenting, registration, linking to forums, or gettin’ the heck outta here. I want my site to be friendly to the naive public, some of whom still don’t know what a button is, where it is, or even which finger operates a mouse. I find it highly entertaining we have this internet revolution going on with blogging that the average web user has only the barest awareness of. Viva!
May 20, 2005. Installed plugin: Comment Quicktags (used to allow formatted comments). A good use for this is to add the "More" tag to posts, showing a line at the end of a post that says, "Read the rest of this post".
May 25, 2005. Installed plugin: WP Admin Bar 2, to add a small admin bar to the top of pages when a user logs in. A code snippet has to be added to a theme’s header.php file to enable this function, as described by Matt, the plug-in author.
May 30, 2005. Installed plugin: WYSI WordPress to allow WYSIWYG posting. Made some suggested modifications given in the readme and WordPress forums to be sure that there was a Yes/No Button to turn WYSI off and allow the old Quicktags labels to be used.
June 14, 2005. Discovered some new themes. Installed and activated Ocadia by Becca Wei. Beautiful, simple, elegant.
June 20, 2005. Changed sidebar.php to remove the word "feed:" from the line that links to "Entries RSS.
June 24, 2005. Installed FeedWordPress. Put feedwordpress.php in the plugins directory; put update.php in the WordPress wp-content directory; rename rss-functions.php in the wp-includes directory as rss-functions.php and replace it with the new rss-functions.php.
June 25, 2005. Install livemarks 0.5 to allow Firefox to discover and bookmark categories of rss feeds.
July 28, 2005. Installed wp-hashcash vsn 2.3 to stop comment spam after the last 4 comments were trying to sell pharmaceuticals.