Yesterday I rolled out an updated theme (created by me) to the site. Overall, I’m pretty happy with the theme, though it took me a bit longer than I had hoped to finish. Strike that, because technically it’s not finished, there are still a couple minor things that I need to clean up…. like adding some kind of “logo”.

There has been far more customization in this theme than the previous d3theme. Before I had based my theme loosely on others in the Wordpress community, but this time I redid everything from scratch. Because this theme is intended solely for me, I’ve hard coded some things into the theme which should mean less database queries, which in turn should mean things run faster. We’ll see how it goes for a few days, I may need to tweak some things later.

I am still relying on a number of plug ins to do some stuff. Let’s face it, plug ins make life easier. Among the plug ins I use are…

• Akismet - This one helps reduce spam comments.
• All In One SEO Pack - Not that I care about SEO, but this helps tweak page titles the way I wanted them.
• Feedburner Feedsmith - Redirects my site feeds to Feedburner.
• Flexo Archive - Gives that nice collapsible archive menu. With post going back to 05/2004 the original menu was getting really fraking long. Now if you click on a year, it’ll collapse and give you the month options.
• Google XML Sitemaps - Creates a nice sitemap for Google (and others) and then submits it.
• ShareThis - That’s the nice little “Sharethis” link on each post that allows you to easily send my posts to your blog, social network, or bookmark a post.
• Simple Tags - Allows for easy management of tags used on post, plus gives that cool tag cloud that you see on the right side.
• Sphere - Allows you to see other blogs that have similar content related to a specific post of mine.
• Woopra - It’s a website analytics service, similar to Google Analytics… I’m starting to like it better than GA.
• WP Related Posts - Shows related posts (duh). You’ll find this on a post page, between the post and the comments.

Additionally, I had planned on adding OpenID support for comments. However the WP-OpenID plug in was really messing up things. I’ll give it another try in a few weeks.

Hope everyone likes the changes! I’m open to feedback.