Living the startup life in Atlanta, GA.

Some people have noticed, but siince most actually just read the RSS feed, I guess most didn’t notice. I had a few major reasons for changing the theme. I liked the custom theme that I used to have, but it was just one more thing to maintain. It got somewhat tiring keeping it up to date with newer wordpress features. It as just not something I wanted to deal with anymore.

Along with this change, I’m also moving my photo galleries off of Gallery2. The reasons were the same, it was yet another system to maintain and another set of themes to keep updated. Just not worth the time and effort. I’d rather spend time uploading pictures and blogging than making css and php changes. I get enough of that kind of stuff in the day job.

I half-way debated about paying for a flickr pro account. I might still go that way eventually, but I’ve been hosting my own photos since before flickr existed and I didn’t want to give up that geek cred.

My criteria for new photo software is that it had to integrate with WordPress so that I’ll only need one theme. It also had to be incredibly simple to keep up to date.

Eventually I settled on the Nextgen Gallery for WordPress. It appeared to be the most feature rich and complete gallery for WordPress. I’ve migrated a few of my galleries and it is easy to use. Of course, it has some limitations that weren’t present in Gallery 2. It does not have an interface for rotating images. Having it so that the interface supports both the original and scaled images requires some hacking. These limitations are small compared to the work required to make two pieces of software look the same.

Of course, since I was in a plugin happy mood, I added a few more. Just in case you’re interested, this is the full run-down of all the software I’m now running on this blog:

Interface:

• Aeros Theme by The BuckMaker
• Background Image: A shot of I-75 taken by me during the snowstorm Atlanta had in 2008

Widgets:

• Skribit Widget for blog suggestions
• Nextgen Gallery image widget
• Twitter for WordPress

Plugins behind the scenes:

• Google Analytics
• Add to Any social bookmarking (expect this to be used a grand total of 0 times)
• Akismet
• Broken Link Checker
• Google XML Sitemaps
• MobilePress (you can now actually view this site on a smart phone)
• WordPress Gravatars
• WP-syntax

I upgraded to WordPress 2.5 a while ago and have started drawing some conclusions.  Stuff I like:

• It didn’t break my existing theme
• The overall feel of the admin interface is cleaner
• The visual editor sucks less
•  Built in tag support
• The comment moderation page shows which post the comment is on

Stuff I don’t like as much:

• Aksimet doesn’t have a ‘recheck queue for spam’ button on the comment moderation page
• The save/publish buttons are un-intuitively to the left of the post. (years of web use have taught me that these belong on the bottom)
• Tags and categories are under the post.  While it gives them more space, they become somewhat hidden.
• The checkbox for categories is at the bottom, but it still a scrolling list one-column wide.  If you’re going to move it, at least use the extra horizontal space.

Overall, I like it a lot better, but I think most of that is the colors are softer and the interface is brighter.  For my standard tasks for writing something and marking comments as spam, the experience is only moderately improved.