As you have probably noticed Randomwire is sporting a brand new look today in what seems to have become a yearly occurrence. While I was quite happy with the previous design (from early 2010) I felt like I wanted something lighter and fresher. The theme is a customised version of Linen produced by the wonderful people at The Theme Foundry (where my past two previous themes also came from).
Flickr has long been the platform of choice for many amateur photographers and bloggers to host and share their photos. It’s simple interface and large active community make it an all round great choice and by using the service to host their photos bloggers can also save a considerable amount of money on bandwidth costs.
For the second time this weekend I got up at an ungodly hour and took the Metro/MTR over the border to Hong Kong Science Technology Park for WordCamp Hong Kong 2009. Two buses and three trains later I arrived at the appropriately futuristic egg shaped conference hall and registered for the super-cheap price of only $10 HKD. The first presentation was by Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress and founder of Automattic. He gave a talk about how WordPress got started, the underlying philosophy, and the where things are heading in the future. There wasn’t really any new content for anyone that’s familiar with the space but it was interesting to see Matt in the flesh and impressive to see how much he…
I’ve been using the wonderful K2 WordPress theme by Michael Heilemann for over 3 years now (and before that its predecessor Kubrick) but it was starting to look a bit tired and frankly I was bored with it. I didn’t have time to design something from the ground up and having searched high and low for a suitable replacement I finally came across Vigilance by The Theme Foundry which combines minimal looks with powerful features. After creating a child theme to customise the CSS a bit you’re now looking at the finished product (although will be tweaking over the next few weeks). How things looked prior to Jan 9th 2009 The new theme is a bit wider than the previous (180 pixels) and looks…
DISQUS is a pretty good service which makes it easier for people to comment and track their contributions under a single profile across multiple sites. To use it with WordPress you install a plugin which is supposed to sync comments between itself and your local database. Whether it was a problem with the plugin or something I did I’m not sure but unfortunately something went wrong last night and I ended up with my local WordPress database containing duplicates of all my comments (not good). Having first disabled the plugin I tried to restore my comments from the previous days backup but unfortunately due to a character encoding issue that didn’t work either and I was left in an even bigger mess! Using the…
If you’re a blogger or have any interest in semantic/content management technologies then you may be interested in a couple of new services which have recently launched with the aim of making content creation easier by automatically suggesting contextually relevant images, links, articles and tags which you may like to include. Tagaroo Tagaroo is based on an initiative called Calais by Thomson Reuters to “connect the world’s content by providing automated metadata services“. The video below sums the concept up pretty well – It has an extremely slick and easy to use UI which sits neatly below the post editor on the WordPress write page, suggesting tags and images as you type. Underlying the interface the magic is carried out using “natural language processing…