February 2007 Archive

Who uses the listen and watch modules?

I currently working trying to fix a bunch of the bugs that have been reported over the last month, and while I’m at it I’ve been adding a few little features here and there to incorporate thing people have requested recently. Thing like the FireFox banner that appears when viewed in IE will now be an option.

I have alos been considering what things I could potentially remove/reduce. I want to try and make Redoable load a bit faster, which is hard because of all the javascript and such that has to be loaded initially, but I’m working on it. I also notice that alot of people are just using the default sidebar, which is great except it doesn’t appear to alwasy work as I expected.

For instance I included two modules, ‘listen’ and ‘watch’, with the intention that I’d use them to highlight music and tv/movies I was recently enjoying. But as yet I haven’t used them at all, and I can’t say that any of the ‘Redoable powered’ site I’ve visited have been using them either.

So I will most likely be removing them from the default sidebar for Redoable 1.2, they will remain available to be used as sidebar modules however, so all is not lost.

Also now is the time to give me a reminder about that bug you reported, and want fixed, or that feature you want added, or that plugin you would like supported. Just leave a comment to make sure I don’t miss it. You’ve probably got about a week to make final requests for Redoable 1.2.

Article 24 Feb 2007 29 comments 0 likes

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Is less, more with a WordPress theme

When I started work on Redoable back in December my goal was to put together a theme that was “feature-packed”. I wanted it to incorporate a bunch of the really cool plugins that were available for WordPress, and make them look like they should have always been there.

Starting with K2 was a good move, it already had a number of the features that I was interested in and gave me a good, well established base to work from. I went about redesiging the layout, changing the css, adding extra options, incorporating more plugins. A little over a month later Redoable was born.

Now Redoable is the sort of theme that I had always been looking for. There were a lot of great themes out there, both simple and complex, but none of them had “everything” that I wanted (I didn’t necessarily ‘need’ everything I put in…).

But in the last couple of weeks since released Redoable 1.1, and while I’ve been working on 1.2 (which will be mainly bug fixes) I have been thinking forward, and in a slightly different direction. Judging by the number of downloads that Redoable has had (way more than expected, trust me), I’m curious to what brought the people in.…

Are they users that were after a feature packed theme, or did they just like the look of it, or even better was it a combination of the two. Just going on the comments on this site, and others which is has since been posted on, it would seem that it very much a mixture of the two.

Likewise there are the users who are using is straight out-of-the-box. Then there are those who are digging deeper. They are changing the colours, playing with the sidebar, and general page layouts. And best of all there those who are sharing what they find with other through the Support Forum.

So that takes me back to the initial question. Is less, more with a WordPress theme? Having mountains of plugins isn’t for everyone. So what features would you look for in a ‘simple’ theme, and more specifically which exisiting feature from Redoable would you sacrifice for the sake of simplicity?

Once I’ve gotten Redoable to a point where I’m more than happy with it, and have the majority of bugs fixed, I will start work on my second theme. This time a much simpler one. So if you’ve got any suggestions, or requests, please share them.

Article 16 Feb 2007 14 comments 0 likes

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Support forums back online

After the drama of the last couple of days, my support forums got a bit messed up in the transfer that I had to do from one user to another. When I got home from work tonight, I got ready for the challenge (I was expecting the worst) of getting them back up and running, without losing any data.

But…they seem to have fixed themselves. Awesome. So with that go forth and post all your support question, queries, problems, suggestion etc.

Support Forums are back online!

To those have applied for membership to the support forums in the past few hours, you now have access. I have also set it back to auto-approve new members.

Article 12 Feb 2007 0 comments 0 likes

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Ok, I’m back

After suffering a complete, catastrophic failure early yesterday morning (my time), I went into panic-mode. What had caused it? How was I going to fix it? When would it be fixed?

After some back-and-forth emails between myself and Dreamhost over the past couple of days, I have finally managed to get back online. Their first couple of suggestions had no effect what-so-ever on my problem. The problem was apparently that I was using too much memory on the server I am on, and their “process managment software” was automatically killing my blog, so that it didn’t shut down everyone else on the shared hosting.

The solution in the end invloved me setting up a new user, which would only be used for this site, all other sub-domains etc would stay where they were. I then had to copy everything from the old user to my hard drive, and then from my hard drive to the new user. Surprisingly just about everything seems ok following the move.

~~One thing that isn’t back (yet) is the support forum. It didn’t like the move so much, so I’m still working on that.~~ Fixed (yay!)

All the messing around to get back online has kind of ruined everything else I wanted to get done over the weekend, including working on the next release of Redoable, and working on a new non-WordPress related project.

To add to all the weird things that have happend in the past couple of days, my Alexa ranking actually went up yesterday (a new high position of 27,652) … now I ‘m really confused as to how Alexa work out their rankings. My site has be out of action for the best part of two days…it will beinteresting to see what the ranking drops to tomorrow.

In other ego-boosting news, Redoable got listed on Smashing Magazines “83 WordPress theme you probably haven’t seen”, that article has recieved over 2000 Diggs already, and the amount of extra traffic it pushed my way (trust me I looked at my error logs) is great, its just a real shame my site crashed around the same time.…coincidence.…hmmm…

Fingers crossed that everything is ok now.

Sidenote 11 Feb 2007 4 comments 0 likes

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Redo-Recent-Links 1.0-beta now available

Many people have left comments regarding the way that the wp-recent-links plugin works, and about some strange behaviour with Redoable 1.1. There is one main difference between wp-recent-links and my modified version, and that is the way links are displayed and counted in the loop.

The default behaviour of wp-recent-links was such that if you had set your blog to display 10 posts per page, and you then post 3 links, you page would only display 7 posts (plus the 3 links). This was because the links were being included in the post count.

I didn’t really like this, so I started looking at a way to modify it to display the links without affecting the loop post count. At the moment, I’ve achieved this with an additional function in the plugin which effectively stops the post counter in the loop increasing when displaying a link.

It is currently in a working state, I’ve been using it on my blog for a couple of weeks without any problems. But if you find any problems with it please leave a message in the support forum.

At this stage I would recommend that you only test this with Redoable 1.1, and not with other themes (unless, of course, you are up to the challenge). Redoable has builti in support, and once you have uploaded the files and activated the plugin it should be ready to use.

Installation instructions are included with the download package. For any support questions please leave a message in the support forum