If you’ve been paying attention you’ll have noticed the site looks a little different from how it did in the beginning. It’s mainly tweaking the text colours and changing the background to white, but all in all it really lightens the site up a bit.

I only noticed yesterday that this WordPress theme had been released under a Creative Commons - Attribution/No Derivatives licence. Basically that means you can’t change it without permission from the author. So I got in touch with him and asked him if he minded the alterations I’d made to it. He very kindly said no, so I don’t have to find a new theme to use, or even more time consuming, write my own. You can visit the theme authors site by clicking on the Bogart link in the very right-hand corner of this page.

Also installed yesterday was the popular pages plugin. This involved two installations, one of Alex Kings back-end, which keeps track of posts popularity, and Just Add Waters popular posts widget, which drops into the sidebar and provided you with a nice little ranked list of a sites most popular articles. Not bad for an afternoons work. The instructions for the JAW widget could have been clearer, as it’s not at all apparent as to exactly where the widget should be uploaded to. Trial and error sorted that one out.

Alex Kings popular posts plugin also comes with a wealth of data provided from blog admin pages, everything you could possibly want to know about the popularity of your posts. Trends over time, pings,track backs , views, everything you could imagine. Details that could help you fine tune a sites content in the future. An indispensable tool in my view.

This has nearly brought to an end the testing phase. All that’s left now is to register a domain, get it hosted somewhere and get the finished site set up. Hopefully my experiences doing the test site will mean that the main site goes up faster. Now I have a fair idea what I’m doing.