Andy @ Hillhome.org » WordPress

Site Makeover

Andy — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 21:36:03 +0000

As you can tell, I’ve undertaken some drastic measures in changing the appearance of this site. Unfortunately, I suffered a couple hacks recently, which have caused me to take a hard look at hardening the whole web site, and various aspects of WordPress specifically. The theme I had been using was heavily customized by me, and just became too cumbersome to keep up to date.

For now, I’ve moved to the K2 theme, which I like a lot so far. It’s certainly much more powerful than a regular WordPress theme, and I’ve had to re-tool some things that were working fine under my old theme.

Your patience is appreciated as things will probably continue to change for a while. Please let me know if you encounter anything broken!

Novell and Microsoft

Andy — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 15:03:58 +0000

I have to say I was as shocked as anyone when word started leaking out yesterday that Novell (NOVL) and Microsoft (MSFT) were set to announce some sort of alliance. After watching the webcast it seems to fit very well with what Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian has been all about since he came to Novell. Ted Haeger makes that exact point in his post this morning.

What really bothered me this morning were all the posts and articles I read that treated this news like an unwelcome religious development. Many in the open source community really do treat their devotion like a religion, instead of thinking about what makes sense from a technology or (God-forbid) business point of view.

Groklaw‘s headline was “Novell Sells Out.” The most common reaction on sites like Slashdot and Technocrat was “Guess I better find a new Linux distribution.” Some of these zealots seem to hate the idea of any ties between Linux/open-source and the commercial world. They are living in a dream world, and if they want to dump Novell/SUSE in favor of a more purely communistic distribution, so be it. We won’t miss them.
I can only hope that this does not reflect the view that our customers will have – I have to believe that they will welcome this as a positive. As Novell has said for quite some time, mixed-source environments are the reality in the IT world today. Making that easier on customers is a good thing, right?

Personally, I’m just looking forward to seeing how this pans out. The advantages for projects like Samba, Mono, and OpenOffice are easy to imagine. Michael Meeks at Novell does a good job of describing what’s happening in the OpenOffice space, and answers some questions that community members are already asking. I really liked his perspective on this deal.

WordPress 2.0

Andy — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 21:55:58 +0000

WordPress 2.0 is out, which means I’ll have to think about upgrading soon. More importantly, I need to test the plugins I’ve written against 2.0.

Update:

WordPress Plugins

Andy — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 20:09:53 +0000

I’ve written the following two WordPress plugins that are now listed on the WordPress Codex:

Stock Quote Tooltip

Stock Quote Sidebar

Give them a try, and let me know how it goes.

Now on WordPress!

Andy — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 22:17:35 +0000

A few months ago, I moved this blog from the blogger hosting service to my own server, while retaining blogger as the publisher.

I’ve finally gotten tired of how slow and inflexible it is, and have just moved everything over to WordPress, on my own server.

So far so good – it was fairly painless to import all the blogger postings to WP, and I found this theme on the Internet and tweaked it a bit…