I’ve been avoiding updating this blog from WordPress 2.2 to 2.3.1. Not that I had made so many changes that would make upgrading difficult, but I just didn’t want to deal with the hassle. Picking a theme was tough enough for me, but I needed to upgrade with all the security fixes coming out.

I finally sat down and went through the process.

Boy, was it easy.

It took longer to download and unzip WordPress and the plugins than doing the upgrade. Having used the Ultimate Tag Warrior to tag all my posts, I was afraid the new tagging functionality in WordPress would screw it up. Instead, the WordPress tag import worked flawlessly and I had no changes to make. There were updates available for all the plugins and those upgrades went smoothly.

No wonder Movable Type is eager to go open source.

Recently I attempted to create a WordPress widget for an AdSense Firefox referral image ad in a widget-ready theme. I was quite surprised how easy it was. It may not be the best code ever, but it got the job done. Here is a quick run-down of how I did it.

Assuming you already have the Google AdSense unit code, create a file like <root directory>/wp-content/themes/<specific theme>/widgets/ff_ad.php and put your unit code in it. You will probably have to create the widgets directory under your specific theme. So the AdSense code in ff_ad.php should look something like this:

Then in the <root directory>/wp-content/themes/<specific theme>/function.php, add this:

At this point, the widget should show up in the list of available widgets for the theme.

Thats it.

Why is it so hard for me to pick a theme for my WordPress blog? I have probably spent quite a few hours this past week, just staring at the huge variety of themes out there. I had been using the Barecity theme for some time now. Its absolutely clean, lets you concentrate on content, and has no distractions. Adding thumbnails of my Flickr images did provide some needed color. Eventually it just seemed bland.

I started thinking about what I was looking for in a theme:

• Clean (not cluttered at least)
• Minimal graphics
• Some color, preferably bright (but nothing crazy)
• Easy to modify

Now, that is a whole lot to ask for, but I figured I would hopefully find a couple that would interest me. So I just started looking around.

The WordPress Theme Viewer is one of the best resources around. I downloaded a few and tried them out. Having done some minor CSS and Javascript work a while ago for my day job, I quickly remembered why I could never make it as a web designer. CSS is its own beast and trying to modify someone else’s stylesheets to work in Firefox, IE6/7, and Opera, is time consuming and practically impossible. Granted, there are probably better tools than the “Edit CSS” tool in the Firefox Web Developer add-on, but I wasn’t looking to spend that much time on it.

To make a long story short, I eventually settled on what you see here. If the theme seems familiar, its the theme used at Blogging Pro. I like the blue and orange colors and didn’t have to make a whole lot of changes besides moving around some content on the sidebars.

Then I moved on to getting my tumblelog to match my blog somewhat. If you haven’t heard of tumblelogs, its just a way of aggregating things that you find interesting. So if you have lots of different accounts at sites like del.icio.us, flickr, Google Reader, etc, its an interesting way of letting others know what caught your attention. There are plenty of sites that do this, I’ve been using tumblr.

We’ll see how long I stick with this theme before I get tired of it and start searching again.

• Top 20 Temporary and Disposable Email Services - Description says it all. - (tags: web )
• Uncertain Principles: Many Worlds, Many Treats - How to explain quantum theory to a dog - (tags: science )
• Webby Nominees and Winners - 2007 Edition. Always a good place to find interesting blogs you’ve never read before. - (tags: web)
• SiteBar - The Bookmark Manager | The Bookmark Server - Use your own server to keep track of bookmarks instead of using something like google sync if privacy is important. Looks like its light enough that it can run off a shared hosting account. - (tags: web)

Tim Ferriss has video interview of how the famous Robert Scoble reads such a large number of feeds on a daily basis using Google Reader. The keyboard shortcuts and “river of news” (which most news readers provide) make it easy to scan through so many feeds.

To catch Robert’s attention, he does a quick mental check: good headlines are a necessity and the content should be link heavy. Link density shows that research has been done and hopefully there is some analysis and an unique point of view. Images are helpful because the readers slow down to look at them. Sites like TechCrunch have gotten popular for including graphics in every post.It’s an interesting conversation of balance between reading lots of different bloggers and other blogs who aggregate and filter for their readers. In a way this is related to the new planet.ubuntu-us.org that has gone live recently. Right now it’s set up to read feeds from sites of approved LoCos, but should it take in blogs of community members of those LoCos who are not CC approved members yet? Does that open up a can of worms? What would happen if a post is made violating the Code of Conduct? Does opening up the planet create an administration nightmare? Or should non-members use other planets like ubuntuweblogs.org?

• Mozart doesn’t make you clever - German government decides to tackle the myth of the ‘Mozart effect’. - (tags: [tag]music[/tag])
• ColorBlender.com | Your free online color matching toolbox - Online tool for color matching and palette design - (tags: [tag]web[/tag])
• NPR : A Former Monk Takes On Love and Capitalism - “Sonam Dhargye used to be a Tibetan monk. Now he’s a runner on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. He left his monastery for love, moving to Chicago with a woman he later married.” - (tags: [tag]philosophy[/tag])
• Display recent nodes (titles & teasers) snippet | drupal.org - To add the ability to view the last X number of posts by writers on a drupal system. - (tags: [tag]web[/tag] [tag]software[/tag])
• Recent weblog entries (titles) snippet | drupal.org - To add the ability to view the last X number of posts by writers on a drupal system. - (tags: [tag]web[/tag] [tag]software[/tag])
• The Happiness Project: The importance of knowing what you LIKE to do, and then doing it. - Although many people assume that popular activities like watching TV are enjoyable, their own reports generally indicate that they feel more engaged, energetic, satisfied and happy when doing other things. - (tags: [tag]happiness[/tag])

• Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site - A whole series on implementing and building sites on Drupal. - (tags: [tag]web[/tag] [tag]software[/tag])

• Speech by NASA Administrator Michael Griffin: Real Reasons and Acceptable Reasons - “I don’t know that one could say that folks like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson led balanced lives. Any rational cost/benefit analysis would tell you to stay out of a quarrel with the mother country, and let other people deal with it! Who today would talk about pledging their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to a cause?” - (tags: [tag]philosophy[/tag])
• People have no idea why they’re doing what they’re doing - (37signals) - Clotaire Rapaille believes all purchasing decisions lie beyond conscious thinking and emotion and reside at a primal core. He helps Fortune 500 companies discover the code (i.e. unconscious associations for their products) that will help them increase sales. - (tags: [tag]business[/tag] [tag]psychology[/tag])
• Because buying new running shoes is more fun than actually running | 43 Folders - “there’s a big difference between buying new running shoes and actually hitting the road every morning. Big difference. One is really fun and relaxing while the other requires a lot of hard work, diligence, and sacrifice.” - (tags: [tag]philosophy[/tag])
• All the glory of the universe, in a single Flash app - A Nikon flash app that shows how tiny humans are in terms of the universe. - (tags: [tag]philosophy[/tag])
• Web 2.0 mind-map - A very impressive mind-map of everything important in web 2.0. - (tags: [tag]web[/tag])
• Adobe: Google’s Best Kept Secret Enemy « Tom?s Blog - “Whose version will Java developers buy? I don’t know, but whoever wins this battle will pull ahead in the enterprise space as all the Java-heads will preach that technology solution to those who sign their paychecks.” - (tags: [tag]web[/tag] [tag]software[/tag])

• How we learned to stop having fun - “Historians of European culture are in substantial agreement,” Lionel Trilling wrote in 1972, “that in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, something like a mutation in human nature took place.” - (tags: [tag]happiness[/tag])
• Write That Down - » Not Being the CEO - A young project manager’s view of what it takes to be successful. - (tags: [tag]software[/tag])
• Car from `Knight Rider’ is up for sale - Yahoo! News - Only $149,995. - (tags: [tag]television[/tag])
• You’re not on a f*****g plane (and if you are, it doesn’t matter)! - (37signals) - AC pointing out that we are already too connected and don’t need offline access. - (tags: [tag]software[/tag] [tag]web[/tag])
• The Elusive RIA « NeelZone - Problems with using Java and Ajax for RIA: system load, network latency and bandwidth, browser independence, and too many technologies involved, HTML, Javascript client-side, PHP/Java/.NET server-side - (tags: [tag]software[/tag])
• The Happiness Project: “what is happiness?” - “After a huge amount of thought and false starts, I arrived at my formula: to be happier, think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.” - (tags: [tag]happiness[/tag])

• Boring SAP dismisses open source threat - CBRonline.com - Kagermann believes that OSS developers like to work on “fun” projects, adding improvements that they can boast about, so they won’t work on issues dealing with Sarbanes-Oxley or Basel II. - (tags: [tag]software[/tag])
• » Desktop vs. Browser - when to deploy applications for each - Ryan points out when he thinks applications should be made for the desktop vs browser. He mentions issues over offline access and security are a bit fuzzy at the moment - (tags: [tag]web[/tag] [tag]software[/tag])