Mike's Musings » upgrade

New Theme

Mike — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 11:58:32 +0000

If you have actually browsed to the site to read this post you will have noticed that Mike’s Musings has had a fresh coat of paint, also if you’ve read my previous entry you will have noticed that it is not the theme that I mocked up. In the end I thought that the first theme was not a good fit for the site, though one day I might turn it into a real theme.

The motivation for changing the theme in the end came down to a mixture of the following factors:

Fluid Blue the old theme had been in service on this site for getting close to four years now and it was time for a change.
I wanted to try my hand at a bit of design, I knew it was not going to be any hugely fantastic but I’m happy with the result.
Finally I wanted to integrate some of the various social networking sites that I belong to into the site, I found that fluid blue didn’t really lend itself to how I wanted it all displayed.

As I noted above I wanted to integrate some of my social site activity into the site to that end I have also integrated my twitter stream into the left sidebar. As with any new piece of code I will not be surprised if there are bugs, I have tested it in IE 8, Firefox and Chrome and it appears to work fine but these are not the only browsers in the world. If you do happen to find anything wrong with the site don’t hesitate to report a bug over at the mlowen.com bug tracker.

Update

Mike — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 06:55:05 +0000

Well it would appear that I’m not dead yet and rumors to that effect may be slightly exaggerated. The main reason I have not been posting lately is because I’ve been in a bit of a funk where I haven’t had the motivation to work on any of my personal projects. With nothing new to show off I have had no real reason to make a post.

What is different with today you might ask? Well not a lot in relation to the lack of motivation to work, however enough semi-interesting – and one important – things have happened which together warrant me writing something. Yesterday I finally upgraded to WordPress 2.8 any issues the site might be having will probably have been caused by the upgrade. Last week I brought a HTC Magic (which runs Google’s android phone OS) I plan to do a post in the next couple of days about how the phone is working out for me so far.

Most importantly, a month ago I quit my job (that was the required notice I had to give) because I was approached with an offer I felt that it would be foolish of me to refuse. Today was my first day at my new job working for LayerX, a small software company based here is Hamilton. Like my last job I’m a software developer and I am looking forward to the oppurtunities that this new position has. Due to this happening I finally got around to updating the about page, it still is not anything fantastic but at least it is up to date.

Site Upgrade

Mike — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 02:49:33 +0000

Today I decided to upgrade this blog to version 2.7 of wordpress, which I managed to screw up royaly. I somehow managed to accidently delete most of wordpress file including all of the files for the theme and the plugins, thankfully I wasn’t touching the database or shit would have really hit the fan. So after wasting time and finding everything again it is all up and running, nothing seems to be breaking so I’m quite happy at the moment. I also finally took the time to enable OpenID for comments, doing this also turned this blog into an OpenID provider as well which is neat because I’ve been meaning to get myself an OpenID for a while.

So far I’m impressed the wordpress 2.7, the work they have done on the admin area is top notch both functionally and aesthetically. It seems to have a much more professional feel to it than the previous versions did, I’m not sure if this was intentional or not but it is nice.

A quick update on gIDE while I’m at it. The new add file dialog hit trunk earlier this morning it isn’t quite what I wanted but it is an improvement over what was there. As I said earlier the remove file dialog was done away with entirely, just using a message dialog seems to be a lot better. Along with those changes I finally got around to adding a right click pop-up menu to the project browser which allows you to add, remove and soon rename files in the project, I should have done that ages ago but I was lazy. Hopefully the last of the overhauls will be finished this weekend so I can get back to adding new features. To round the project off I thought I had better provide a screenshot of the new add file dialog.