James Pine Has A Blog

One of the things I struggle with is resisting the temptation to, “build vs. buy”. Certainly I’m capable of writing my own blogging software or designing my own theme; however, my goal is to start keeping track of my thoughts and ideas and embarking on either of those endeavors would not be productive.

Initially, I tried the “easy mode” install of WordPress via my webhost’s, DreamHost, management panel. However, I decided that was too restrictive. I’m now using their “advanced mode” install, which allows me to customize my WordPress installation quite a bit more, with a trivial amount of extra overhead.

Of all the default themes, Pressrow, seemed the cleanest that also integrated customer header images. It doesn’t appear to support plug-ins, but I’m hoping if I get to the point where I feel the need to incorporate plug-ins, then it’ll be a simple change to use a different theme. I did run into one setup issue with Pressrow; initially the archives link wasn’t working. It turned out that for this version of WordPress (2.7) I just needed to add an archives page, set the template to Archives and set my permalinks option to be date based. I’ve already uploaded some customer header files, edited the css file accordingly and am happy with the look.

I’ve also started using categories and tags but the Pressnow theme doesn’t seem to have support for them in the right side navigation. That will likely be the next adjustment I make. However, it seems there are permalinks for categories (http://www.madpickles.org/rokjoo/category/<category>) and tags (http://www.madpickles.org/rokjoo/tag/<tag>), so I’ll just use those for now.