A quick tip for all you WordPress users out there. If you have a lot of spam in your spam queue, and use Akismet, be sure to press the Recheck spam link in the top right of the listing. Often that will decrease the amount of spam dramatically, saving you some time.

I’ve got an interview up with the excellent Lorelle VanFossen, of WordPress fame, over at BloggerTalks. You should read it if you’re even remotely interested in blogging.

Observant tdhedengren.com readers have seen this text in the footer already:

the tdhedengren theme is based on the notes blog theme and powered by wordpress

What is the Notes Blog theme then, and why didn’t I design a theme myself, being a designer and all? Well, that’s just the thing: I did. The Notes Blog theme is a project in the works, I’ve mentioned it in passing before. This blog is running on a modified version of it. More

Where I live the golf season is more or less 10 months long, at least if you can take a cold wind and some rain every now and then. I can, at least if I get my ass on the course. Then it doesn’t bother me all that much, wearing the right stuff helps of course. It’s a lot harder convincing yourself to go out for a round if the weather is bad before you actually leave home for the course, but that’s just me being lazy or something like that.

Anyway, it’s Spring here and the golf season is well on the way. I’ve played a couple of times (was a slow starter this year) and it makes me feel all that better. Just getting out in the fresh air walking, swinging and enjoying life for a couple of hours is a real boost. You need that, you know, since sitting in front of a screen is a very static kind of life.

Now if someone would just hand me $1200 so that I can upgrade my gear. My golf clubs are from 1994 or something like that, and they took this winter badly with rust and whatnot. It’s about time I upgrade. Maybe I should do a PayPal fund raiser for me upgrading golf clubs, promising to release a Wordpress theme to the public or something.

Anyway, don’t forget to get some air and leave the computer every now and again. You need it too, just like I do.

I delivered two Wordpress themes today. Hopefully I’ll be able to link to the sites using them pretty soon. So yeah, client stuff. I’ve got a bunch of concepts spinning in my mind so hopefully I’ll be able to get going. This blog needs some love, you all know that of course, and I’m gonna finish up the two other projects that are on my table this week or the next. Well, not finish but at least push them out of my hands for a while. How’s that for being cryptic huh?

My crossgrade for Adobe Creative Suite arrived, got installed and works like a charm. I need my Photoshop, like most designers. And 901am got posts today as well. All in all I’m pretty much steaming along.

Feeling better just rocks. Almost back to my own self. I’m going to celebrate that with a sturdy single malt away from the computer.

Alex King, the famous Wordpress plugin developer extraordinaire, is interviewed over at Bloggertalks. I think Alex gave some great insights on plugin development, how the community handles it and so on. Oh, and he talks about Wordpress in general, Automattic and the Share Icon project as well.

Head over to Bloggertalks and take a look!

No, it’s not a new theme, it’s just time for some Wordpress 2.1 galore, as well as some other small plugin stuff that I’ve been neglecting.

Stay tuned…

Update 1
Right, that didn’t work out to well… It would seem that the theme I’ve been using won’t even show up in 2.1. Bummer. Also, the rating plugin is way dead even if it shouldn’t be, which is a bit surprising. Update continues…

Update 2
It would seem that this particular blog doesn’t like plugins that resides in folders inside the plugin folder. Very weird. Will have to look further into that. Also, UTW are having some problems so I haven’t bothered installing the tags yet. This will have to do for now - will continue when I’m less pissed…

Update 3
Spam Karma isn’t visible in the plugins section, even though it is installed. It resides in a folder… A bug, or just craziness for me? Akismet will protect my blog for now. Meh. Work continues later…

Update 4
I’ve reinstalled everything for the third time (second one that’s seemingly successful) and managed to activate the Share This plugin, which resides in a folder… Breakthrough? Keep your fingers crossed…

Update 5
It just occurred to me that I’m liveblogging my Wordpress 2.1 install problems. Scary. Seriously… Another two plugins seems to play nicely now, are the problems over? Moving on…

Update 6
What do you know, we’re back to our usual selves…! Well, not really, but you can’t see that so who cares. I’m taking my chances with the UTW plugin by the way, it appears that some people are experiencing problems with it (an update is in the works). Now let’s see…

Final update
Well, that’s it for now. This blog is now running on Wordpress 2.1. As you can see above the update did not go smoothly. I will try to find out why this was the case, since I did indeed follow all instructions, and this isn’t exactly my first time doing updates if you know what I mean. Still, the only thing I can think of is that something got corrupted on the way and, well, just went bad. I’ll keep a close eye on the blog during the upcoming days.

Phew, glad that’s over. Go read something else now.

I’ve updated to version 3.0 of Steve Smith’s Tiger Admin for Wordpress, and it looks wonderful. A lot of nuisances have been fixed, such as the trackback form, and the overall style is a lot easier on the eye. The font is smaller though, which might or might not be a bother to you, but I don’t mind. It’s still sweet and stylish.

Tiger Admin 3.0 also offers better support for lots of plugins. For instance, if you have many plugins activated that have options pages, the top menu now works better, in part because of the smaller font of course. I’m also happy to see that 3.0 and Ultimate Tag Warriors plays nicely, they did before as well but it didn’t look this good.

The one thing I did find was in the category box on the post screen. I still think that field can be improved around the Add category input box. There might be other things as well, I’ve just started to play around, but I’m pleased.

Head over to Ordered List and download Tiger Admin 3.0. Do you like it?

I’ve gotten quite a few questions from people I know and will get to know about blogging. Why blog, what can I do and so on. When convinced that they actually should blog, then comes the how’s.

I always recommend Wordpress, an open source blogging software that kicks ass, but to some people even this nifty little thing can be a hassle to install.

So I point them to Wordpress.com, Automattics’ hosted Wordpress solution that also kicks ass. And I get a suspicious reply, ending up with listing the features for the service to convince them I actually know what I’m talking about. Which I do.

No more. Thank you, Wordpress.com.

Right, so I’ve been adding to this post for a while now, with every thing I’ve done technically here at tdhedengren.com. It’s meant to be both informative and something of a timestamp of this blog.

More