Work and related stuff

• Get a few more Plone 3 sites under my belt
• Finish off my User Interface Design and Evaluation course (well, I’ve got to do this, I’ve not got a huge amount of choice in the matter) and really get to grips with all those HCI concepts
• Roll up my sleeves with Flash again
• Get another theme or two out for the Out of the Box Plone themes project
• Go to the Plone conference in Budapest this year

Non-work stuff

• Do my ‘52 photos’ project — a photo a week for 2009
• Maybe release Hamnavoe or any other Plone theme I design for Wordpress
• Get better at Photoshop
• Get through my German course
• Do some more writing in some form or other

I tried setting up a redirect from my main Wordpress feed so it pointed to the Plone-specific feed but I couldn’t get this to work for some reason (maybe to do with the limitations of my through the web redirect editor, maybe something to do with the “virtual” directory structure in Wordpress). However, I came across this Wordpress plugin which seems to have done the job very well: Redirection by Urban Giraffe. This has a good range of functions to support redirecting, including the ability to match on regular expressions.

For now I’ve set my main site feed to point to the Plone category and will work on creating another feed for all other stuff. I’ll keep my eye on Planet Plone — if this post comes through then it’s back to the drawing board. If so, I’m open to other suggestions on how to sort this out!

As an addendum, I’ve just checked the Planet Plone site and my blog’s RSS feed is already listed as pointing to my Plone and Zope categories, so I’m not sure why it’s picking up non-Plone stuff.

• Making Wordpress my site’s CMS and moving away from “static” PHP pages that had to be edited via Dreamweaver
• Installing an existing Wordpress theme for my site’s design

I’m pleased with the result I have to say. It will make it much easier for me to edit content on the site which means it’s much less likely to get out of date.

I like the theme I’m using: Cutline. It’s nice and clean and the kind of thing I had in mind when I was thinking about a redesign. I haven’t done anything to customise it, save putting in a few of my own images but I’m pretty much happy with it as it is.

I’ve got a few things planned, particularly with the new “Offline” section which I’ll use to highlight my non-web interests. I’m working on producing a nice Flash-based photo gallery to supercede my old PHP Flickr one but it might take a while to get going as it’s not a very high priority for me at the moment.

A few redirects means that old pages should redirect to their newer equivalents. I’m keeping my “new” site in a separate subfolder so I can still have directories outside of Wordpress to play around with various things.

The version of Wordpress I’m using is 2.5.1 and whilst I didn’t find all of it immediately intuitive, I’ve managed to get the site up and running with reasonably little effort. Compare that to the amount of work it takes to get a Plone site working! Well, Wordpress and Plone are two very different beasts, but I think Plone could learn a lesson or two from how much easier it is to theme Wordpress.

Another thing I like about the newer Wordpress is the page editor: bar some minor annoyances, it was pretty good in the older version I was using but the new one has buttons for embedding media which means no more resorting to hacking in the HTML then losing it next time you edit the page. Nice one.

I’ve fixed this problem and thought I’d turned off the settings that made people register before they could post. Unfortunately it seems you still need to do this. I have no idea why — maybe it’s something to do with this version of Wordpress or just my theme that’s up the spout. It’s enough to make me want to move back to a free hosted service! With Blogger you can ftp your posts to your own website. If I had the time I might consider it.

In the meantime, if you do want to post a comment to this blog and you don’t want to go through the faff of registering, just drop me an email to my gmail address: d.little1971, or david at this domain (littled.net).

Anyway, I’ve decided to bring my blog back into my own site as I think it makes more sense. I’ll get round to skinning it so it looks like the rest of the site but for now I can live with the default template.

I’ve managed to procure some Plone hosting so I’m shortly going to get to work setting up a new site. This will effectively be my “commercial arm”, Little Web Creations, and I’ll move references to my consultancy / freelance work to it. It’s a Plone 3 site too, so I’m really dreading looking forward to getting it skinned.

I’ve actually got some posts relating to Zope and Plone which I’d better get on and write.

Before I do that, I was just looking through some of my old lamentable posts and re-read the one about wanting an iPod Touch, or really an alternative to it, sad individual that I am. I plumped for an Archos 605 Wifi in the end. I’ve been pretty impressed with it so far, but the jury’s still out a bit on it, especially given the stupid amount of money I’ve had to spend on plugins (browser, video podcast plugin, TV dock and mini-dock, the latter which I’ve lost already). My advice — if you’re getting one of these the only things which are essential are the browser (what’s the use of having Wifi without a browser) and the mini-dock (for quick recharging). I’d leave the TV dock alone unless you really want to record TV programmes on to it.

Right, let’s get cracking.