Got Wills

I think I’ve finally gotten all set up again. I’m now running OpenSuse 10.3 on VMware Server. I upgraded my computer. I’ve got the latest release of Wordpress running and a theme that I really like. Isn’t it great looking… and yes, those are my three beautiful children in the header image. For those that have slow connections, I apologize for the large size of the picture (almost 100K), I couldn’t justify reducing the quality of the picture.

I had too much trouble with Microsoft Virtual Server to keep it around after my hard drive change. Almost everytime my computer had an unscheduled reboot (my power went out), it dropped the virtual network card and created a new one which drove opensuse crazy.  I’ve had no such problems with VMware server. It was also a lot easier getting the VMware tools running than it was getting Virtual Machine Additions to work properly. So now my time is syncing and all (my clock was running a little slow before I installed it). Getting the mail setup correctly threw me a little. Opensuse 10.3 uses Postfix by default, and I had only setup sendmail, and my ISP requires authentication for outgoing mail now. I eventually found the necessary instructions. It was actually a lot easier to set up than I thought it would be. I ended up using my ISP’s SMTP server as a relay and SMTP AUTH to get me logged into it.

I finally got enough money to get some upgrades for my computer. I upgraded my memory with two 1 GB sticks of RAM. I also tossed a 200 GB hard drive that I had laying around… bad idea, it crashed two weeks ago, so I convinced my wife to let me get a 500 GB hard drive to replace it. We really do need it since we just got a digital camcorder, and my little 80 GB was filling up with pictures alone. Anyway, all of the updates are installed, I’ve dedicated 256 MB of memory to the virtual server, and everything is running a lot better.

I’ve converted my Wordpress instance to a subversion install, it’s now a lot easier to upgrade when a new version is released. After browsing themes for a few hours I found one, PDawn, that I thought was okay, but it wasn’t widget ready, like it said it was. It’s not a huge issue, in fact, I could make it widget ready myself it I wanted to. I searched some more and found Coulorful Wall, this one was worse than PDawn.

1. It wasn’t widget ready (didn’t claim to be).
2. When I went to a different page, the link background changed on mouse over, but was white again when the page loaded.
3. Used h3’s on the sidebar instead of h2’s (made my widget enabling it less effective).
4. There are some stats on the header image… not live stats, just part of the image… annoying.

After searching a little more, I came across Finestripes… and I loved it the second I saw it. I even liked the default picture in the header, but replaced it with my children, anyway. It wasn’t widget ready, but it wasn’t hard to make it widget ready. It also made the search widget look a little off, but a little hacking fixed it right up. The tag widget was also a little tweaked,  but a couple more hacks in style.css took care of that.

All in all, I’m quite happy with my blog now. I think I’ll leave it alone, and I’ll even try to get blogging a little more often.