After realizing that it was unlikely that I was going to go through the work of posting a thumbnail image for each and every post, I decided to go with a different free “premium” theme.

Enter Quickpress

And yes, I’m pretty much just doing this because I’m procrastinating some work tasks…

Theme Logo

Smashing magazine was offering up this layout for free. Get it for yourself here.

Anyway, it looked like fun, so I thought I’d give it a try. It took a little extra configuration to get it working for my purposes, but so far so good. This post is my first attempt at adding a thumbnail to the post itself (which is why the other ones on the home page look weird now).

Let me know what you think!

P.S. I’ve also upgraded to Wordpress 2.6. Man, this software is leaps and bounds more advanced now than it was when I first setup this blog!

I’ve updated this site to the latest release of Wordpress — 2.0. Completely painless upgrade as the folks at Wordpress have compiled an excellent set of installation/upgrade instructions as well as a VERY important list of plugins that do/don’t work in the new version.

This new interface for creating posts is crazy awesome!!! It might take me a bit to get used to all of the different things it can do, but I think it’s going to make creating these posts a ton easier — especially in terms of image management. By the way, that image over there has nothing to do with upgrading this site, but my nephew is cute and I wanted to play with the image features.

I’ve been getting 20-30 spam comments a day for the last few days, which was really really grating on my nerves. So, it was clearly time for an upgrade in spam protection. It appears that I timed my need pretty well (although the increase in comment spam is probably related to some spamming bozos trying to break this new tool), since the people behind Wordpress just release a new comment spam tool called Akismet.

It took a bit of finagling to get it up and running. The plugin installation is simple, but you need a Wordpress API key to make it run. You can get those by signing up at Wordpress.com. But, when I put in my email there, I didn’t get an “invite” back. So, I played a little more, then decided to see what the whole Flock tool was all about. So, I followed the Flock link, downloaded the tool, installed it, and sure enough was able to find a quicker way to set up a Wordpress.com account and therefore get an API key.

So, now let’s see if I can stop the stupid spammers!!!

This wasn’t a burning need, since the Flickr Gallery plugin was working pretty well for me, but I decided to update the photo album here to use the FAlbum plugin from Elijah Cornell.

To view the photo album now, click here.

I like some of the additional features in here, like the ability to view the photo in different sizes, and a cleaner/simpler method of paging through the photos.