Since Media Temple have updated their 1-Click Applications to make WordPress 2.7 available as an upgrade, I upgraded WordPress and decided it was time for a new theme.
I won’t lie, I pretty much nicked it from one of the themes available on iWeb. I figured if people are allowed to build websites with this theme for their own use I should be able to get away with falling short of stealing it. To be fair, it was hard work to make the theme WordPress friendly and generally easier to understand when looking through stylesheets and templates.
I guess I should also have tested it on other browsers on other platforms (so far I’ve tested it only on the latest versions of Safari, Firefox and Opera on Mac OS X) and God only knows what it’ll be like on Internet Explorer, for those still brave (read daft) enough to use it!
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I have returned — I have fixed the problem I was having, which seemed more to do with my host than WordPress itself. A lot has happened since my last post.
I’ve been told that I have been rejected a place on the PGCE course, to my extreme annoyance. It seems the reason for declining my application was because I am not a teacher. The feedback suggested I ought to get experience teaching for a length of time before applying again. However, getting a decent run at teaching a class of secondary school pupils is hard to obtain: you need a teaching qualification. For much of the PGCE course, this is exactly the experience you get. So it feels like I can’t do the course because I haven’t done the course before. It’s a shame.
I guess I am a fool for applying to Newcastle University again. It seems a ridiculous reason to turn away what would have been a committed and enthusiastic student and a talented teacher. I suppose it also serves me right for chasing after a position doing a thankless task. It used to be medicine. Perhaps I ought to chase after self-glory, easy wealth and the supposed lure of the City. There seem plenty faceless, ruthlessly competitive financial jobs there, but they just don’t interest me, and as for London…
I suppose I’m too picky. I want a job with pressure I can handle; I want to be creative and to be able to apply all the skills I have collected from a wide variety of disciplines; I want to be an important member of an organisation so I can feel committed and settled. These are few and far between.
We get the Evening Chronicle every Thursday for jobs: the number of jobs available is getting lower to the tune of around 100 a week. There were less than 500 this week. Most of those were either teaching jobs or those that request a ridiculous amount of experience for the wage they offer. They aren’t even willing to buy experience; they just expect it. Every receptionist job going wants three years experience "in a similar environment". Why bother? I may as well look into self-employment.
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So far this week, two major patches have been released: Patch 2.4 for World Of Warcraft, and Patch 2.5 for WordPress.
The new WoW patch was implemented on Wednesday, promising yet more content, including more daily repeatable quests and more dungeons. But it’s not what I really wanted. Who wants to do the same thing over and over again? And that is what WoW is once you get to the maximum level: performing the same tasks over and over again, for better gear and gadgets. It sounds silly, but it’s too much like real life!
WordPress 2.5 is rather different. It’s taken a little getting used to, but it’s offered more of the features that I wanted — tag editing is the biggest improvement for me. By some sort of subversive underhand programming, every time I tagged "friends", it changed it to "Friends" which is rather different as far as I’m concerned…
So some change is good.
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I’m on the Uni computers at the moment. I’ve just looked at my theme and it doesn’t look nearly so nice on a CRT monitor with fingermarks and God knows what else smeared across the screen. I can tell you the keyboards aren’t that clean either… So you might see some changes afoot… like prompting the ISS to get proper screens.
Or perhaps I should have taken heed of my own advice: I’m writing for the 34SP WordPress blog with the intention of directing poor misguided folk through WordPress installations; creating and uploading themes and picking out plugins for their site. I’m not exactly sure why I am doing this: I am meant to be getting free hosting for this but it does not seem to have materialised…
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The SDC results were announced yesterday, and I managed a point with one of the judges for one of my designs! Not the best of results, but then again it wasn’t the worst of results.
I was a little sad for CITYscape, which failed to score with the judges, and I felt that was my best chance. I think the problem was that a part of the design failed on the live preview, which was extremely annoying, but that’s life I guess. And the point is, I’ve learnt from the competition, and I’ve corrected that mistake, and released Chocolate Vanilla for Sandbox, so onwards and upwards!
But for now, I’m taking a break… my right wrist is beginning to click again. 
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Some people have commented on my theme (well, ok, one person has), which prompted me to release it. If you would like to try it out (on WordPress, of course) then please feel free to download it from the Simply Sea page. I would be glad of any comments (and criticism, though please be gentle!) and suggestions.
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I have just noticed a new tab on WordPress.com – if you are a member, you might notice this next to the ‘Options’ tab. On this page, you will find that, for $15, you can purchase 15 credits. So what can you do with these credits?
You can create customisable CSS stylesheets. In other words, you can decorate your blogs more or less the way you want. This might be good for the advanced user, but you might regret forking out the equivalent in pounds sterling (which is not offered, by the way – bad WordPress) if you think you want to customise your blog when really all you want to do is to change a few colours. Sometimes it’s best left to the experts.
For most, the existing templates are more than ample – there is quite an array, and they are an indication of how different your blog could look with customised styles – and these are done by the professionals and learned enthusiasts. My advice is that you should practice with styling wherever you can for free (you can do this in the comfort of your own computer). If your designs are that good, WordPress might approach you for your design anyway¹.
One good thing though is that it appears that it is not a subscription – it seems to be a one-off payment. So once you pay (via PayPal), you’re done. Except for designing, of course. Which I suppose makes WordPress.com better than LiveJournal…¹ I guess you would have to submit your design via WP.org for loads of other people to try out first. Seeing as I haven’t tried it, I won’t advise you people any further than my knowledge extends… which usually gets me into trouble 
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It’s something I have pondered about for a while: should I get a feed reader? I have had this thought for a while, and the fact I haven’t acted upon the impulse goes a long way to indicate my opinion of feeds.
On the one hand, it means I don’t have to go to every site I usually visit and pick out new articles. On the other hand, I can store a session in Opera, or store all of my pages in the Favorites (unfortunately, that is the correct spelling).
And then there is the wasted effort of all those web designers who make their sites nice and pretty, whereas a feed reader would be the equivalent of asking Gordon Ramsay for some egg and chips (which has happened…) and ask him to deliver them. Producing a feed is probably near the back of a web developer’s mind when constructing a site, so why waste a talent? Converse to this, perhaps feeds and the development of XML in this way is the future. In which case less thought can be put into design and more thought put into distribution. Ha! You could say the money is in being the paper boy, not the newsagent.
It would be good to find more sites that I can visit regularly. Perhaps I could find some like-minded people. Actually, scrub that – it would be quite scary! The problem is – and I have no statistics to back this up – a lot of blogs don’t last. I should know, I have eight¹, and only this one I maintain!¹ Three MSN Spaces, one MySpace, two WordPress, one WordPress.com and one LiveJournal. The WordPress ones are the best, by the way!
...with 3 replies.
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