I remember why I don’t change themes that often, but sometimes you just need a new song. It’s a pain, especially when going to a theme that’s a bit more minimal in its design purpose than the previous one. I miss the big footer of the previous theme. I also miss the extensive refinement of it. On the other hand, I just found this new one so pretty that I felt like a change. The smart thing would have been to just leave the cosmetics of the blog alone and do other stuff, like sleep, or talk to real people.

There’s still a list of stuff I have to do to get this new theme up to what I want, such as what to do with the Tag Cloud, put it on a separate page, stick in the archive, or sidebar it? Hell, the default Tag Cloud widget doesn’t show up right. I want to try and figure it out, even if that’s not the way I’m going to go.

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Temporarily switching from the Comvatar comment icon to Gravatar via the Easy Gravatar 1.1 plugin. One nice thing about Gravatar is you can keep your icon across any blog that is Gravatar enabled. The downside is few people have one registered (register one!). I’ll see how it goes for a couple of weeks before deciding which comment avatar system to use.

I hate updating Wordpress, so I don’t do it often. This weekend I updated from:

• Wordpress 2.1.3 to 2.3.1
• Theme: Tarski 1.3 to Tarski 2.0.4
• Flickr Photo Gallery 0.91 to 0.93.2
• Imported Ultimate Tag Warrior tags into the native WordPress tag system

The only thing that doesn’t work right anymore is the Comvatar plug-in. I’m pretty sure that’s because of the upgrade to Tarski rather than the upgrade of Wordpress as the Comvatars still show up everywhere they’re supposed to except for in the actual comments themselves. I did a quick switch to some Sandbox themes and the Comvatars show up in the comment, so it’s a Tarski thing. I’m reluctant to leave Tarski behind as it is an extremely well supported theme. I’ve customized my Tarksi theme a bit and even jumping 8 or 9 releases, most of my customizations have remained intact, save for the tag cloud which should be fixed with available plugins and the problem with the comvatars.

Or I could just take this opportunity to start with a new theme.

I forgot to update my billing information with my host, so the site was down for a little bit. ^^;

And while I’m here…I increased the post width and body by 20 pixels. I didn’t notice anything broken in Firefox, but can’t say that for any of the other browsers since I don’t have them to check. I’m sure something in IE6 looks funny.

As some of you know, I host my images via Flickr, which I’ve found to be a great convenience. Flickr has decided that I need to change my image safety level from “safe” (default setting) to “moderate,” which I don’t have a problem with. I’m sure some parents wouldn’t want their youngins to see some of the shots I take. Unfortunately, this means you have to be logged into Flickr if you click on the pictures (to get to size options) in the blog posts. On the other hand, at least the links to the images in the picture gallery seem to be fine. I guess since the picture gallery links to the large sizes hit the source URL instead of the Flickr page it gets by the filter.

I’m still going to keep my Flickr account and upload photos there, but I think I’m going to look for another photo solution for this blog. I could change the plug-in I’m using to do the same thing with the blog posts as the picture gallery, but that will be a pain updating the image links in past reviews (I’d only do the most recent ones anyway). If I’m going to do that, I might as well look for something that might do what I want better, like I kind of wish Flickr had a slightly larger medium size, not much larger, maybe a 10-15% size increase. In any case, if anyone experiences any weirdness with the pictures over the next couple of days, it’s because I’m messing around with it.