Theme change: Retromania

Don’t adjust your eyeballs, it’s just a theme change.  This time I’ve gone for Retromania, made by Jay Hafling.

WordPress two and a half

The more astute visitor may have noticed a slightly different look to this site.  I’ve made a theme change to Mandingo, prompted by an upgrade to WordPress 2.5; I thought I’d change to something that was labelled as being compatible with the new version.  I’m not 100% happy with the theme (italic block quotes make the TAB look a bit iffy, though maybe I should be using a prettier method for that anyway, and a spurious extra “-” symbol in the title of the front page), and though it will do for the moment, there are liable to be more changes.  If I had unlimited free time I’d write my own theme, but currently I’m very easily distracted by the lure of Team Fortress 2.  If you’ve been fried by a pyro going by the moniker of “yer mum,” that was me.

Hacked

Nuts, this blog was hacked at some point in the last month with a code-injection exploit that was fixed in version 2.3.3 of WordPress. I browsed to my homepage but was interrupted by Google telling me that visiting my site would bring untold death, destruction and the loss of my firstborn… or maybe it was something about badware. Anyway, after much gnashing of teeth and using www.spybye.org, I spotted that an iframe had been inserted into the site

I also simultaneously discovered that the WordPress database backup plugin does not do what it says on the tin; it seems to send me a gzipped file with a 4kB file in it which only contains my database log-in details, and for the life of my I can’t work out why.  I could still do a manual back-up via my host, then text search in the file to confirm that I’d removed all references to the iffy iframe.  Hopefully the site should now be free from such crapola. Apologies for any inconvenience. If this isn’t a gentle nudge to keep up-to-date with WordPress releases, I don’t know what is.

Theme change

Don’t adjust your sets, it’s just a theme switch; I noticed that the old Warped theme wasn’t compatible with WordPress 2.1, so I’ve gone over to the Freshy theme.

Theme change: Warped

For lack of anything to say, I’ve changed over to Kaushal Sheth’s Warped theme.  This is also my first proper foray into using Widgets to organise the sidebar.  So far, so good: I wanted a section on the sidebar to show my flickr feed, so grabbed this plugin, enabled it and the widgets plugin, set a few defaults and there it was, easy as pi.

Anarchy media player

Just found a handy wordpress plugin: the Anarchy Media player.  Takes a minute to set up and activate, after which it turns all those pesky media download links into little professional-looking flash media players.  Seems to work ok on this site (example), and I’ve also slotted it into the Acuphuncture listenables page.  Works for quicktime and flash movies just as well as mp3s, so should I ever make something worthy of visual as well as audio content I’ve now got a nice way of showing it.  Which reminds me, I must get the video of the bungee jump I did in New Zealand turned into some format more permanent than a video cassette.

Squible theme

So, this is the Squible theme.  Yes, it’s back, but I’ve disabled AJAX comments, so people should actually be able to reply to the crap I write here.  In some ways I like this theme: you see a couple of posts, then below that a general index-type area showing my Flickr photos and last.fm stuff, along with recent comments and posts.  And I like the idea of asides, though perhaps having them waaaaay down there at the bottom on the right means that people won’t see that bit updating seperately from the main blog entries.  And where are my links, eh?  Maybe I’ll change back to something more like the standard two-column lay-out after the shineyness wears off, who knows?

Update: OK, I found the links page.  Panic over.

Theme malarky

You might notice that the theme used on this site has gone waaay back to the original Kubrick style.  This is because Derek pointed out to me that the comments system wasn’t working very well: it seems that the AJAX comments used by the more modern themes (Squible, K2) weren’t working in Firefox.  I couldn’t get them to work in IE either, so I added funkysimon.com to my “trusted sites” list in IE’s options; now I can’t look at the site at all in IE, even after clearing the trusted sites list.  Arse and bollocks.

K2 reloaded

Hang on, just messing about with the k2 theme, potentially with an eye to moving over to k2 reloaded because I’ve been excited by “one column” layouts recently…

Yet another theme change

Yeah, I know I’m being capricious. I spotted that the old flex theme had lots of validation errors, so I thought I’d quickly plug in something that validated properly, and chose the Twilight theme. Revel in its pinkness! Of course, while the new theme’s HTML validates, the CSS doesn’t. Ho hum. I shall be hacking this theme to make it a bit more personal at some point soon anyway, so maybe I’ll have a go at fixing it.