I’m a little punchy; my sleep cycle has just been off lately, and I had only five hours’ sleep last night, meaning that at the moment, everything has a very slight tinge of fatigue-induced surreality to it. I’m going to hit the sack early, though; I’m subbing for someone who’s ill today, and I don’t need my immune system sputtering out and leaving me open to a germ attack.
Main thrust of this post was to point point out the obvious, which is that I’ve changed the website’s appearance. I upgraded to WordPress version 2.1, and then decided to bite the bullet and update my version of K2. At the same time, I wanted to move all of my sidebar customizations into widgets; widgets can successfully crossover from one widget-ready theme to another, allowing yourself to customize your sidebar without marrying yourself to one particular theme. When I realized that K2 and widgets weren’t playing nice together, I looked about on WordPress’ new themes directory, and found Blog.Txt, which I am so far happy with. Lots of white space, simplicity and focus on the writing, and so on. The nice thing, however, is that with the sidebar widget-ized, if I feel the urge to change themes again, it’s going to be considerably easier, since I won’t need to be concerned about transferring over the theme customizations.
I also took advantage of this to heavily secure the site against spam. I have three layers of protection — probably more than I need, but hopefully not so much that people can’t get through. I’m using Bad Behavior, Spam Karma, and Akismet. Hopefully, this will dissuade spammers from targeting the blog like they have in the past.
The Google AdSense project is earning a slight bit of dough. Nothign considerable; since it’s been up, there’s been about $11 accumulated, and after a little bit of research, it turns out Google’s not going to send me anything until the counter reaches $100. Ah, well. Very far down the road, hopefully the counter might hit $100. I’m not holding my breath, but for now, I’ll leave it up.
5 Comments
Why is there the horizontal scrollbar!
It looks like Spam Karma’s footer is the culprit. I’ll attend to it when I can.
Taken care of — thanks for the heads-up!
I like the new look! As a former Chicagoan, I do miss the banner. But there’s lots of color on your site (I think these themes just do not work for people who don’t blog any photos or youtube stuff).
I am having trouble with my theme–hosted at wordpress.com. I want to start hosting myself partly because the themes provided on the free wordpress sites don’t quite do what I want. The ad possibilities are out there too.
Kate, glad you like the new look. The banner was nice, but frankly, I really like the whitespace and the black-on-white simplicity of this new look. I’m a fan of simplicity.
As for hosting yourself, let me know if I can assist any in the transition. Correct me if I’m wrong, but WordPress.Com either doesn’t allow you to install plugins at all, or probably, if it does, severely limits you. If so, you’re missing out on most of what makes WordPress a quite cool blogging system. 
And with a site as frequently visited as Bedbugger, I imagine even some simple Google AdSense ads could produce a tidy bit of change. Anyway, I’m definitely not a high-end expert, but if I can be of any assistance if you set up your own WordPress blog offsite, let me know. I’d recommend LivingDot, my webspace provider — they seem to be good folks.