Been getting to grips with WordPress ‘pages’ today. (As opposed to posts) Those of you who are still paying attention might have noticed that more of the links are working up by the header image. Namely HOME, ABOUT and DONATE all do what it says on the tin…

About is a bit thin at the moment, I’ll be adding to that at a later date, but the Donate page has a working PayPal button and an Amazon WishList, which I think is quite cool. Not that I’m expecting a huge rush on there. It’s just the fact that it’s so easy to interlink everything.

Talking of interlinking, it’s possible to push the blog posts to your Facebook page fairly easily, so I might do that at a later date.

If you have any comments about the layout fo the pages or the site in general I’d really like to hear them.

Yesterday was a day of purchases. Feeling flush from the arrival of an employment opportunity, I splashed out on the domain names I wanted. So, now I’m the proud owner of a dotcom and a dotcodotuk (doesn’t have the same ring to it…)

There were a couple of mispellings that could be snapped up in the meantime, but I’m not throwing too much cash at this to begin with. That can wait till later. I also secured the domain details in such a way so that people can’t go on a fishing expedition to discover your personal details. Probably a wise move in these days of identity fraud.

Now I just need to get some content written for the main site, get it hosted, and off I go.

Wish me luck!

This test blog has been up for less than 4 weeks now, and today I had my first spam comment. Just the one, but I imagine the numbers will only increase from now on. It’s not like I’ve gone out of my way to publicise this address either. I think I know why it’s happened though…

By signing up to FeedBurners ping service, to let a number of aggregators or scrapers know when a new post is uploaded, I’m guessing that the comment spammers also pay attention to these services. On the plus side, lots of people get notified that there is new content available, on the downside, some of those people are bastards.

I’ve already activated the anti comment spam plugin for WordPress in the hope that that will reduce the amount of spam that needs human intervention. Fortunately none of it would have reached the front page because I still have the comment moderation turned on. Such is life.

Yay! Got the comments sorted. Simple when you know how, bit of cutting from here, bit of pasting from there and before you know it you’ve got a working comments page. It looks a bit weird, that’s becaue it hasn’t been tweaked to match the rest of the site. Think of it as a proof of concept. So feel free to leave me a comment or two, just because you can. They won’t appear straight away, because the comment moderation is turned on…

This is the genius of WordPress, you can edit everything from the web thru a browser window. I love it. The only thing I need is a base to FTP stuff to the server on occaision, though I think there are probably ways round that as well.

Right, best get on with styling the page so it looks presentable… Oh, and updating the actual WordPress installation because they’ve gone and released an update.

Having looked over the code in the example themes and hunting round the WordPress site I still can’t figure it out. How the hell do you enable the comments code? It really is a puzzle.  I can see what’s going to happen.  I’m gonna’ have to hollow out a theme where it does work and then refill it with my own code so it looks how I want it too.  Damnit, exactly what I was hoping to avoid.

I would invite you to leave a comment, but as yet that’s a no go. Best get back to trawling thru acres of barely understood code then…

You might have also noticed that the header image and footer are now in place, thanks to some prodding. Cheers Steve!