Upgrading to WordPress

One of the biggest dangers associated with having as many websites as I do — a good half-dozen, at the last count, including this one, this one and this one — is that it’s hard to keep generating content for all of them. And, while I’ve been busy writing about all manner of other things, I’ve been sadly neglecting my very own site. I looked at it recently and realised that I hadn’t updated the content in over a year and a half.

My website, before rebuilding in WordPress

The irony, of course, was that I’ve been working on plenty of other sites about, and for, other people and other things. I’ve been using WordPress as my new primary web-design tool; it’s gone way beyond the blogging engine it used to be and has become a fully-featured and quite mature content-management system. I’ve been taking advantage of its flexibility for my other concerns and clients, so I decided it was time to rebuild my own site in WordPress.

The problem was, I built my site a couple of years ago in DreamWeaver, and I quite liked the look of it. It wasn’t, I’ll admit, the absolute last word in design — I’m much more the writer and technician; the lovely and talented Mrs. McCabe is very much the designer of the operation — but I was fond of it. The challenge was how to re-purpose the design I’d created in DreamWeaver as a WordPress theme.

In the end, it turned out to be quite remarkably easy. I’ll post a complete blow-by-blow one of these days; for the time being, here are the basic steps:

• Install WordPress on my hosting service. This was quite straightforward — my hosting service use Fantastico De Luxe, a very simple couple-of-clicks installation system. Once it was set up, it was time to
• Create a new theme. This basically required two files in a folder in the Themes directory of my WordPress installation. Despite what I’ve read elsewhere, it looks like all that’s required is a basic template file, index.php, and a stylesheet, stylesheet.css — so long as those two are there, you’re in business. The next step was to
• Upload the stylesheet. A little bit of tweaking of the .css file and it was ready to upload to the server. This contained all the designy goodness of the site; all that was left, now, was to
• Replace verbiage in the home page to WordPress .php code. This was the tricky bit, but, with a fair old bit of trying, reloading, re-trying, re-reloading and so forth, it turned out to be a fairly straightforward process.

So there it is. SteveMcCabe.net is now live again. It’s all but indistinguishable from the old version. I did make a couple of very small adjustments that I’ve been meaning to make for a while, but otherwise the site’s where I wanted it to be.

Tags: CMS, Me, Software, web, website, WordPress

The sincerest form of flattery

Among their fanboys at least, Apple are particularly lauded for their innovation, for their uncanny ability to create new and creative solutions and ideas, the newly-announced Magic Mouse being a case in point — it’s still a mouse, still does the usual point-and-click stuff that any old mouse should be able to accomplish, but at the same time, it’s also a multi-touch surface capable of all manner of gesturey goodness.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I happened across this latest bit of Apple brilliance. Yes, Apple have suddenly realised that their Mac mini is the ideal machine to use as a headless server if you’re not quite willing to fork over the monstrous sums required for an Xserve.

The idea, of course, is simplicity itself. The Mac mini is a perfectly capable computing engine, but one that, out of the box, lacks the human-interface bits and bobs that would be required to make it a fully-configured end-user machine, but which are entirely unnecessary for a server. Brilliant.

In fact, so brilliant is the idea that I’m glad I thought of it myself. In fact, not only did I think of it myself, I even wrote about it, back in January of this year.

I’m torn. On the one hand, I should be indignant that my brilliance, my sheer genius, my thinking-different-ness, has been appropriated by The Other Steve. But on the other, imitation is, as they say, the sincerest form of flattery, and, magnanimous creature that I undeniably am, I’m willing to sit back and enjoy the fact that this latest [ahem] innovation has driven Apple’s share price up a healthy additional nine dollars.

Of course, now that I’m in New Zealand, I find myself less than impressed by Apple’s stock going up; gains in APPL are barely offsetting the nosedive of the US dollar against real currencies such as the kiwi dollar. But still, maybe I’ll make enough to buy me a new Magic Mouse.

Tags: Apple, disappointment, Imitation, Me, mini, OS X Server, Ripoff