Indablog

A tool called MagpieRSS has made my life a lot easier. I used it to parse and print the RSS feed from Google’s blog search. On the advice of something I read somewhere I converted all of Magpie’s .inc extensions to .php, which required editing some functions inside the relevant scripts. No big deal. Being new to this, though, I wonder if the .inc naming convention makes a distinction worth keeping.

I tried an alternate WordPress three-column skin called Cordoba_green, but it was a little buggy (still in beta) and a little too bright, so I finally settled on a four-column skin called Quadruple_blue. I played with its CSS a little, trying out different fonts and colors for titles, links, and text in my RSS feeds, but I’m too aesthetically challenged to improve upon what’s already there, so I put it back. The best part about the way WordPress works is that I can use the CSS for the whole site, not just the blog. To my eyes, things are starting to look OK. In fact, my other sites now look rather pathetic. I should change them all.

I also used Easy Icon Maker to make a favicon, which I touched up in Windows Paint to make a first draft of the Indaba.org logo. It should be simple enough to place the favicon and the new header inside the blog itself.

WordPress is apparently case sensitive about username logins. That confused me when I first tried signing in as flywheel rather than Flywheel. I don’t expect there will be many authors here, but it could get frustrating in different circumstances.

Filed under: Development Chronicles