Helvensteijn.com

Last Monday, WordPress 2.6 was released. Because I grew more and more unhappy with my WordPress installation hanging together by plugins and hacks, I saw this release as a good moment to do a completely clean install.

I made a database dump and a WordPress export, dropped all tables in the database and removed all files in the WordPress directory after a backup of wp-content. Then, I made a fresh SVN checkout, imported the WordPress backup, and tweaked the settings.

So right now, this web site runs a bare naked WordPress installation, the only active plugin being Akismet.

I’ve decided not to use my old theme again for this installation (it also became quite hacky after a while). Statistics show a rapid decline in Internet Explorer 6 usage. Last month, its share was about 15.7%, this month up to yesterday that number has dropped to 13.0. So either this month or the next, I expect IE6’s share to tumble beneath 10%, at which point I no longer deem it important enough to warrant support.

Then, I can finally make some more complex designs for this web site without a large number of visitors being stuck with crippled pages. Think about some more advanced CSS2 (IE7 is not quite the yet, but at least a lot better than is predecessor) and alpha channel support in PNG images without resorting to nasty hacks. Until that time comes, I’ll just use the default WordPress theme. It is fairly decent, despite being massively overused.

There’s a few other things on my todo list. First one is installing the few plugins that I do want to use, second is moving this web site to a new webhost again, this time a virtual private server, so I have root access and can do whatever I want. It also comes with its own IP address, so I can take care of the third item on the list: mirror this website on a subdomain and secure it with my SSL/TLS certificate — impossible right now, because SSL/TLS and name based virtual hosting don’t mix (without a not widely supported extension).

I also took this opportunity to move my photos page elsewhere. While NextGEN is a very decent plugin, I wanted to keep this installation als lean and clean as possible. So I chose to move my photo albums to my MobileMe gallery. In my upcoming new theme, I will link there more visibly, right now there’s just a small link in the sidebar.

Now that I have a new hosting provider which offers a lot of disk space, I could finally do what I wanted to do for a long time: make an online photo gallery.

I’ve got 9 albums online now, but that number will undoubtedly grow in the future.

The whole thing is powred by the NextGEN Gallery plugin, and of course tweaked here and there.

I also added breadcrumbs navigation — using the Breadcrumb Navigation XT plugin — and I made some tweaks to the rest of the site.