I’m experimenting with a new theme called Thesis which is now running the look and feel of this blog. Thesis is created by Chris Pearson, a US-based web developer who has produced some pretty cool WordPress themes over the years.

Thesis is a very good example of a new breed of WordPress theme - a theme that contains some intelligence in its creation and significant added value to go along with it, all of which enables you the blogger to adapt it to your specific requirements without having to do any PHP code editing.

You can do almost all your tweaking with a combination of the Thesis Options page in your blog, which appears once you’ve installed and activated the theme, and a custom cascading style sheet (CSS).

What you’re looking at today is Thesis literally out of the box. About the only design thing I’ve done so far is add some of my own images to the rotating images feature you see at the top right of the page which automatically changes the image as you move from post to post on the site.

I’m not sure if I’ll keep that feature - it’s quite neat, though - nor what elements of the out-of-the-box theme I’ll change or adapt.

Whatever I decide to do will largely be driven by my desire and wish to have something that is a bit personal to me and this blog and not just another cookie-cutter WordPress theme (or as the default WordPress tag line says whenever you install a new blog, ‘just another WordPress weblog’), points directly address by Chris Pearson:

Just a WordPress theme? Hardly. Thesis is a search engine optimized HTML + CSS + PHP framework equipped with an innovative options panel that makes it easy for anyone to run a professional, customized blog or Website (without being a code jockey).

For some months, I’ve been thinking about re-designing my main blog as I’ve had the current design for about a year (my own adaptation of a WordPress theme created by Michael Pollock).

So part of my reason for installing Thesis here is to play around with it as a potential prelude to implementing it on the main blog. Or not.

Another theme I was considering is one of the Revolution series of themes by Brian Gardner. Like Thesis, Revolution adds intelligence to provide you with easy-to-understand controls from within your WordPress blog admin to tweak the design pretty much how you’d like without your having to dive into any coding.

Revolution is becoming quite ubiquitous, which was a downside for me. I see too many blogs using one or another of the themes in the series without much customization. A bit cookie cutter.

Of course, Thesis could end up like that. But it’s early days yet and I just like this one better.

Earlier I mentioned that Thesis has ‘added value’ to go along with its added intelligence.

That ‘added value’ comes primarily in the shape of a full-blown support forum as well as online help, tutorials and other useful content on the Thesis blog that Chris Pearson maintains.

All of this represents quite a commitment and so if you want Thesis and all the extras that come with it, you’ll have to pay for it to the tune of $89 for a single-blog license. I’m more than happy to do that.

Thesis and Revolution (which also provides a forum, tutorials, etc) are leaders in the pack of so-called premium WordPress themes - themes that you pay for and get additional value beyond the collection of PHP files, CSS, JavaScript and images you upload to your server.

You do have a number of alternatives that range the scale between free themes and hiring a theme designer to develop your own exclusive theme.

But for me, Thesis seems to be nice middle ground.

Upgrading your blog platform requires some essential planning beforehand, notably backing up your database at the very least. WordPress has a handy upgrade guide which, if you follow all the steps, should result in a successful upgrade.

I do read that guide every time I upgrade. But for the last four upgrade versions of WordPress, I’ve upgraded everything with just one click.

Well, not quite. But I use a reliable service from DreamHost, my hosting provider, that literally does everything in one click. It has a snappy name - 1-Click Install.

So my upgrade path goes like this:

1. Backup the database.
2. Disable all plugins.
3. Run DreamHost 1-Click Install and wait for email confirmation that upgrade done.
4. Log in to the blog and re-enable all plugins.

The only time I’ve ever had an issue with a WP upgrade via 1-Click Install is when I hadn’t disabled plugins before doing the upgrade. (I would have had that issue however I’d done the upgrade.)

There’s lots to discover about WordPress 2.6 especially new features like Google Gears support to speed up your blog admin, and enhancements for editing posts such as wiki-like version control, word count and adding captions to images.

Now that I’ve successfully upgraded, the most crucial thing for me at the moment is getting the answer to this question - does Windows Live Writer work with WordPress 2.6?

I write all my posts and pages in WLW - by far the best offline blog editor for Windows - including this one, so this post is testing that it works.

The reason that’s an important question is that WP 2.6 introduces a significant change, one that will affect offline editors like WLW.

The change concerns XML-RPC which, in very simple terms, affects whether your offline editor can connect to your blog or not. If XML-RPC is disabled, it can’t.

For fresh installations of WP 2.6, XML-RPC is disabled by default. For upgrades, like mine, it’s enabled.

Luckily, it’s a setting that’s easy to control yourself and you’ll find it in Admin > Settings > Writing:

Both Atom and XML-RPC are topics that have been talked about a bit in recent months in relation to WordPress development.

Anyway, I’m happy with how the upgrade to WP 2.6 went. Now to test whether this post publishes ok from Windows Live Writer…

[Post-publish edit] Yes, it did publish just fine, exactly as I was expecting. That means I’m comfortable going ahead with upgrading my main blog soon.

I’m about to upgrade this blog to that latest version via the 1-click install functionality provided by my hosting service, DreamHost.They are exceedingly quick off the mark in making this upgrade available, so avoiding the manual upgrade process.

If the upgrade is successful with no issues (eg, with any plugins), I’ll upgrade my main blog within the next few days.

Everything should go swimmingly…

[Later] It all did go swimmingly. About 15 minutes after I activated the 1-click upgrade at DreamHost, I received an auto-email saying the upgrade was done.

A link in that email took me to a screen saying the database required updating. Clicked on the ‘update’ link; a couple of seconds later, I was at the site, all looking exactly as it did before the upgrade.

When I logged in, though, I got an error. Rather, I got a blank screen with a single line of text, a link to Technorati inbounds.

My immediate thought was a plugin error, specifically the Berri Technorati Reactions on Dashboard plugin. A quick dive in to the site via FTP and I deleted the plugin.

(I hadn’t disabled any plugins before doing the install, against the recommendations in the upgrade guide in the WordPress Codex.)

That fixed it - the login in now works correctly and no errors appear as this screenshot of the new dashboard shows:

Soft pastel colours are the first thing you notice about the appearance of the new dashboard.

And it’s behind the scenes that the changes from versions prior to 2.5 are really apparent, starting with that new dashboard. Lots more to discover, though.

So, a successful upgrade to WordPress 2.5.

It makes it easy for visitors to listen to a podcast here and now - all you have to do is click on the ‘play’ image you see on a post that has a podcast available (see this FIR post for an example) and the podcast plays. It’s that simple.

It also lets you choose whether to launch its player in a popup window if you prefer. And you can download the MP3 file instead if you wish.

From the podcaster’s point of view, it seamlessly interfaces with iTunes, providing that service with all the info it needs in order to categorize your podcast and make it available to subscribers.

Podpress provides useful statistics on how many downloads you’ve had, whether direct from the site or via the RSS feed.

Yet I’ve had nothing but trouble with any version of Podpress later than version 6.8 which is what is still installed on this blog.

And I’m not the only one if ongoing comments in the Podpress support forum are an indicator.

The latest version is 8.8. There have actually been 19 updated versions since 6.8, but I’ve stuck with 6.8 as it’s the only one that always works without any trouble in my experience.

Recent versions of WordPress include a nifty alert in the admin page listing plugins which tells you when there’s new version available of a particular one.

Podpress is always there but I no longer attempt new versions. My experiences include much of what you see in the feedback topics shown in the screenshot. This is what you see on the Podpress plugin page on the WordPress plugins site - hardly encouraging.

I’ll continue with 6.8 until there’s a later version I can have some confidence in. Or until someone builds a better mousetrap.

Along with Akismet, this plugin is at the front line of defence against spam and other ugly stuff that hits your blog on a regular basis.

As with all plugins that I regard as essential, I tend to upgrade to the latest version as soon as I know there is one.

This was the case with BB 2.0.1.3, released in late January, which I installed the other day.

Then I noticed this paragraph in the text explaining fixes in this update:

A bug in Bad Behavior’s user agent blacklist code caused blacklist matches to become case-insensitive, when they should have been case-sensitive. Among other things, this caused pingbacks and trackbacks sent from WordPress blogs to fail. This has been fixed.

Bold emphasis is mine.

Wtf? Now I know the answer to something that’s been bothering me for the past month or so, which is that I got the feeling that outbound trackbacks just weren’t working.

A good test of that is when you write a post with a link to a published post in your own blog. In my WP blogs, that always generates a trackback.

But I’ve not seen any since around Jan 18 when I upgraded BB to the then-latest version 2.0.1.2.

And which means that the 40 or so posts I’ve written since then in my main blog which include lots of links to other blogs and websites, not a single trackback went to any of those places.

That is a real bummer. At least the bug is now fixed but I’m disappointed in BB.

That content is now here; everything you see in this site that was posted in 2005 and 2006 was originally in that other blog.

That blog was also a migration, from NevOn Experimental, a blog I had on TypePad.

Time to shut those down now (with a redirect in place although they now have little traffic) and move on to what’s next.

Incidentally, if you plan on setting up a WordPress blog and importing content from a different platform as I did, the import feature in recent WordPress versions makes the process simplicity itself.

As this screenshot shows, that feature supports importing content - your posts and, depending on the source platform, comments and trackbacks as well - from 14 platforms.

The WordPress Codex has easy-to-follow guidelines on what to do, including details on how to import content from more platforms.

So I’ve decided not to spend hours on choosing a theme but to go with one and let it stick for a while. The active theme for now is Suweet 1.0 + Widgets, the one upon which I based the theme for my main blog when I did the design refresh there last August.

Now on with a bit of tweaking and then some actual content!

(Also, writing this post with Windows Live Writer so a quick test on how that works.)

Still quite a bit of work to do here but I decided that I might as well make this move now.

This is the simple move. The big one (to me, at least) will be moving NevOn, my primary blog, to NevOn 2.0, its new home based on WordPress. When that happens, the addresses of the blogs - that one and this one - will be the same mapped addresses that the current blogs use, which are mapped to the underlying TypePad addresses.

I expect to complete all this by 1 January 2006 or sooner.

So with that in mind, I just started a new blog on WordPress.com, the new free blog hosting service launched in August by WordPress.

Very easy to set up and the admin interface is very similar indeed to that of WordPress itself, ie, what I see with this blog when I log in to it.

I received the invitation - you have to be invited - from Rob Safuto. Rob’s also a multiple blogger - in addition to his excellent PodcastNYC, he also writes the highly-readable The New York Minute Show, an insider’s podcast about the Big Apple, and the Red Room Chronicles, a blog about Marriott Hotels.

I’d actually received an invite from WordPress in September. But I didn’t get around to activating it until last weekend - which is when I discovered that the invite expired after seven days.

Anyway, I have the new blog, just called Neville on WordPress.com. Not sure yet what I’ll do with it nor how frequently I’ll post to it.

Have to see how much of that copious spare time I can use.

(Cross-posted from NevOn 2.0, my WordPress experiment.)

Re my experiments with Movable Type and WordPress, I spent a lot of time late last month in setting up the two blogs (MT here and WP here) as part of my learning process about each platform. As I’ve commented in this blog, I plan to use one of them as my new platform for my new primary blog - “NevOn 2.0″ - which will be hosted on my own hosted server rather than through TypePad as a hosting service.

Even though I’ve not had time this past month to physically do much with those experimental blogs, I have been thinking a lot about my next steps.

This is what’s in my mind right now - I will use WordPress as my primary blog platform.

My limited experience so far shows me very clearly that WordPress is much easier to use than Movable Type. So for my primary blog, I want a platform that enables me to achieve most of what I want to do, especially with look and feel, without constant recourse to help files or asking others for help. I read a good review in eWeek about WordPress.

Yet I still want to get to know Movable Type more, especially as in my perception it is more likely to be the platform that you’d want to go with if you were considering blogging within the enterprise, in particular with multiple blogs and/or multiple authors. As I talk to a lot of companies about corporate blogging, it’s important to me that I can speak from a position of hands-on experience when discussing platforms. Then there are the plans announced by Six Apart last week on Project Comet, their vision for the future of blogs and platforms. Very interesting indeed.

So I’m going to hedge my bets.

What I’m thinking is that I’ll develop my primary blog on WordPress and use Movable Type for secondary blogs like this one, NevOn Experimental (so maybe it was a subconscious reason why I switched styles yesterday on my MT experimental blog to match the style of this blog).

A major point still to decide - do I import all the content from my main blog to the new WordPress one, or not? Same with this blog to the MT one. Or do I leave them where they are and in effect start again with the new blogs? I’ve got a paid TypePad subscription through until the end of July 2006 so leaving them here isn’t a problem for at least another 10 months.

The other thing, too, is the nevon.net domain name. That’s currently mapped to both these TypePad blogs. I will re-map the domain to the new blog meaning that both of these TypePad blogs will revert to the underlying TypePad addresses. That will no doubt affect anyone who’s bookmarked any specific blog posts, but I can’t see how to avoid that.

I need to make a firm decision sooner rather than later, and then just do it…