Blog theme change

For all of you who read my blog in their feed readers, the web theme has changed to something less standard, to something lighter and breathing. I have simply fallen in love with this theme at first sight. It’s clean, it has lots of space, elements are all bold and meaningful, it’s based on my favorite grid (3 column 950px, the main part takes 2 columns). Oh yeah, and I tend to like white color…

Upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.7 Beta 1

Upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.7 Beta 1 several minutes ago. So far so good. I like the look of new Dashboard and its overlook of important parts, however my aesthetic sense is hurt. The worst selection of fonts and sizes ever in the history of WP, the width of the sidebar is disproportionate, font face families are different, non-matching colors… In other words, just like a sample from a “what you have to avoid at all costs” article.

Hopefully, they will fix that soon. Otherwise, great job!

Wordpress: “Unable to locate WordPress Plugin directory”

Automatic plug-in updates are cool, but only when they work. I made attempts to understand what’s wrong with the “update automatically” feature several times, and always hit the same message after entering my FTP details: “Unable to locate WordPress Plugin directory”.

As a computer geek, I know why it needs FTP, but it wasn’t really clear what exactly it was looking for in the root of the FTP directory and why it didn’t find it. I figured that my server setup is a bit different from what they expected, and scanned the sources for clues.

Apparently, they are looking for the wp-settings.php file which is sitting in the root of the WP installation. So when they find the file, they know where to start looking for plug-ins folder. In my case, it was light years away from the FTP root, so here’s what I did:

• Created an FTP user specifically for the blog
• Made the root folder of the blog be the home directory of this user
• Fed the user name and the password to WP when it asked for the FTP again

All went very nicely and hassle-free. Now you know what to do when you see “Unable to locate WordPress Plugin directory” when attempting to update your plug-ins automatically.

Wordpress 2.6 is Out

Just noticed the release of the next Wordpress version — 2.6. Check out their release summary video to get an idea of what has improved and how. Good stuff.