Robert Leverington

So I just upgraded Wordpress to the latest version (as kindly prompted to do by my administration panel) and decided that this would be a good opportunity to talk about my experience with Wordpress and having a blog in general over the three months I’ve been posting for.

Contrary to my original thoughts it has not been difficult to find topics to write about, almost every single day I have something that I want to talk about - of course this isn’t always translated into posts. I haven’t got very much feedback, although it is difficult to judge my readership as it stands - aside from the one or two people who I personally know that subscribe. In fact the most difficult part of having a blog has been developing a theme, currently it is rather bland, and although I’m trying to design an improved one this isn’t exactly going to plan; design creativity isn’t my forte, apparently. I’d like to start taking photographs to brighten up my blog, need a decent camera first though.

Wordpress itself is a dream to work with, the dashboard is elegant and smooth, and behind the scenes it is easy to develop themes with. While there are still many features that would be great to have, it’s awesome as it stands (I’d love to develop some stuff for it, but learning another codebase is something I don’t have much time or will power for at the moment).

I also recently purchased a VPS and have been using it quite a lot in an effort to centralize my SSH and SFTP sessions and allow me to connect to an environment I am used to and can work with from nearly anywhere. Since I have full control over it I’ve been able to connect to it from school after configuring it to run the OpenSSH daemon on port 443 rather than the conventional 22; this also makes it more secure, of course. While I am currently using sshfs with FUSE so that I can access files across systems from a single filesystem it does have disadvantages and it occasionally refuses to delete certain files.

I’ve used eBay for quite a long time, mainly due to the fact it is virtually the only auction site that has a large enough user base to be effective. But, for much of its existence, development has been sub-par. The site often lacked cross-browser compatibility, had an archaic look to it, and had questionable policies; while small improvements are being made here and there - little substantial work has ever been undertaken.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I find a new interface to the search mechanism. Without a doubt it looks modern and trendy, but usability appears to have been sacrificed greatly. It is now very difficult to differentiate between individual results, and between the pieces of information presented. Another feature that has disappeared is the quick tab to get between “Auction”, “Buy it Now”, and “Both” - instead it is hidden in a nasty search refinement menu. Narrowing results to “Buy it Now” is one of eBay’s key features, and is now very time consuming to access - the tab will sorely be missed.

It is my opinion that competition in the auction field is needed, this would stimulate development by eBay, and would also provide fair pricing and policies to consumers. Unfortunately, due to eBay’s apparent monopoly, this is unlikely to happen in the near future without substantial involvement by a competition body - either here, in Europe, or in the US.

A few months ago I registered this domain with a view to setting up a small website to document a few of my on-off projects, maybe generating a bit of publicity for them, while at the same time providing informative articles that might help someone. The tricky part was choosing a content management system.

Generally there are two paths that can be taken when creating a website, develop your own templating script, or use a package such as Drupal or Wordpress (now in use here). I like to think that I’m fairly good at PHP, so jumped straight in at the deep end and began hacking together my own basic website templating engine; nothing too advanced was needed - just a way to keep pages in a hierarchy. As you can probably tell, this quickly fell to pieces; my interest in programming it started dipping and I was left with yet another half finished project - I just wanted to start writing some content.

A while ago I made a website for an open source project using Drupal as the primary application, this worked fairly well; the community was fairly large which meant that anything less powerful would have quickly been overrun and the administration overhead was fairly low. I had gained a fair bit of knowledge regarding how it could be administered and effectively used, so installed it to try it out as a personal site. The vast amount of configuration required was quite daunting, and much more than one needed for a small personal site (even if the hierarchical page organisation scheme is one of the best available). It was quickly scrapped and I moved back to developing a new custom templating engine.

Again, this soon stalled, so I looked into alternative content management systems; Wordpress is a fantastic engine, but the theme editor lets it down (I wasn’t too fond of the administration interface that I remember it having, either). The last time I’d used it was about a year ago, so I thought that it might be worth a trial (Sean Whitton managed to convinced me that “it’s fantastic.”) - and at this point I was getting desperate; my complex hierarchy system design had evaporated and a blog would suffice for what I now wanted. After installing it, I was amazed at how sleek it now was, far from the clunky interface it had previously; it’s a pleasure to use and I’m grateful I chose to reevaluate it.

This blog is still a work-in-progress, although I aim to update it fairly regularaly with small articles on specific topics and my current projects, so hopefully it won’t fall in to demise. The next major thing to do is have a go at making a theme, hopefully this will be easier than one would expect.