You’d think I enjoyed dabbling with my WordPress theme and plugins wouldn’t you

Ok, yes, of course I do. It’s great fun.

The smiley above is one such change, as I updated my “smiley pack”. I’ve also introduced the calendar which you can see at the beginning of each post. The way to do this is relatively easy (assuming you know your CSS and a bit of PHP). At first I had an iPhone style background for it, but after a scourer of the ‘net, I came across this more suitable dark version. Very nice, and I chose a text colour to match (it was white before and looked obviously stuck over the top).

The menu at the top has recently changed, to include some popular categories, and the sidebar had a refresh a while ago.

And, thanks to Tony, I’ve now added footnotes¹.

Finally, I’ve settled into Twitter and am now happy to say what plugin I’m using for that! I kept swapping at first as I tried various Twitter plugins, all of which didn’t work quite how I wanted. I wanted two pieces of functionality – to be able to inform Twitter of a post and to be able to display my latest Twitter – and thought I’d have to have two plugins. In the end, though, I cam across Twitter Tools which does both and has all the functionality that I wanted. Perfect.

Not WordPress related, but whilst on the subject of Twitter, I also experimented with Firefox plugins – TwitterFox ended up the best of that bunch (I wanted a simple way to post Twitters from my browser, and one that didn’t fowl up through my works proxy and firewall).

However, as much as I’ve plugged into my blog, I’ve also taken out – there were quite a few functions that I simply wasn’t using. It’s also keeping this installation as lean as possible – thanks to the shoddy speed of my hosting I need all I can get. As soon as I can scrape some money together I’m off to Memset (yes, yes, I keep promising that I know).

1. and this is an example [↩]

When I originally reviewed Google Chrome I did at as a home user. I’d just got my mits on it, installed it, browsed with it and gave my comments. And they still stand – it’s not very exciting and the speed increases they spoke about, I can barely notice them.

However, having spent some time reading more about the Chrome browser it becomes evident that this is far more important that it may first appear.

First of all, we have the OpenSource V8 JavaScript engine – written from scratch in machine code (rather than a higher level language, as others are).

Secondly, we have the fact that Chrome manages each tab as a seperate process. This means if a website crashes, it only takes down that tab.

Lastly, we have the various commands that can be typed in to display memory and process managers. A bit like the information on Windows Task Manager (you know, CTRL, ALT, DEL).

All of this means two things…

1. Once we get the plugins and all the other nice stuff that makes Firefox so cool and froody, this could pan out to be a superb browser.
2. If Google is not (and the moment they say they’re not) intending this to be their own OS then I’ll eat… my arse.

And by that second point, I mean the Chrome has all the components that makes it an OS – everything runs in separate processes, with memory and process management, etc. We all knew that with so many applications going online, then something as basic as a browser was the future of OS’ (although you still need something “backend” to run it on, and sort out hardware, etc) and this certainly looks like that way.

And, I’ll be honest, as a Beta release Chrome is pretty damn stable and un-buggy.

Now I just want to be able to change that default theme…

For those who haven’t come across Twitter but know of Facebook, it’s like everything stripped off of Facebook, just leaving the status function. Basically, you leave a sentence about what you’re up to and friends, relatives, whoever can view it.

What’s interesting about Twitter is the level of integration that’s available. For example, the TwitterBar is a Firefox add-on that lets you update your Twitter status from the Firefox address bar. Or – and this is great for sheer laziness – the Facebook application that will update your Facebook status from Twitter!

Anyway, I’m a recent convert and you’ll notice that the top of this blog now has my Twitter status (it’s the line of text on the right under the top menu) – I found out how to do that from another blog.

I’m sure the love affair won’t last and my use of it will fade into obscurity. But then again, you never know.