DewKnight.com has a new theme! I felt it was time for change since the old theme had a few weird errors and design flaws in it. This new theme is Illacrimo by Design Disease.

What do you all think about it? Should I keep it? Go back to the old one? Get a completely different theme? Here’s the old design:

Don’t forget to enter the Mountain Dew / Entrecard contest! All you’ve gotta do is take a picture of a Mountain Dew.

Here’s a new series for you: How to make your blog not suck.

First up in the series is plugins. You can easily make your blog not suck and your readers not hate you by getting rid of all of those hundreds of plugins, badges, images, etc all in your sidebar and all around your blog. You should have a billion little things making the page really long and slowing down the load time. When you have a lot of junk in there it slows down browsers and just makes people get angry at you. Plus, it makes your blog suck.

Think about what value these plugins and images offer, and weight that against how much people hate you for them.

You can’t beat me, foolish spam! No matter how many spambots try to post their comments and trackbacks on my website, Akismet will protect me!

Seriously, I’ve had thousands and thousands of comments caught by akismet as spam. I think I’ve had one false spam comment and five comments that were spam that weren’t caught. I love Akismet! If you’ve got a blog and are having a ton of trouble with spam, just install the Akismet plugin.

Upgrading Wordpress to 2.5 Please hold.

Upgrade complete. Wordpress 2.5 looks all pretty, and I’m glad that I haven’t had any problems in upgrading.

When I upgraded I noticed the post count. I have made 402 blog posts on DewKnight.com since it started (I think that was about 2.5 years ago). While that’s not a ton of posts, it’s at least a post every couple of days. I’ve written about pretty much everything on this blog and I will continue to do that. I am of course still trying to write more about Mountain Dew (since that’s what I’m all about).

I’ll be writing a new post a little later about a new Mountain Dew product.

I am using a new design for this site. I liked the old one but really wanted 3 columns for the stuff I wanted to display. With the old one it would make an individual post extremely long if I added that stuff. Now posts are awesome size without any extra space at the bottom.

The only things that have changed are the subscribe to comments plugin doesn’t work (It’s not showing the checkbox for some reason). My comments are also not being highlighted right now (before they were in green). I am going to work on that later. It’s not as simple as most designs.

And a little rant: I wish people making Wordpress themes would adhere to some kind of standards. They all like to make them slightly different so all plugins that look for a standard line don’t work. If they just did what the default Wordpress theme did then they would be awesome! It would also be cool if they spoke English. I always have to go and change different terms from engrish to something that makes sense. Oh well.

I keep doing little bits of web design despite wanting to get rid of it. I think over the last two days I have gone through about 25 different designs for the church website. I finally settled on using Wordpress as a CMS instead of coding it all myself. I did have it mostly coded but it would just be so much easier for everybody to update if it were using Wordpress.

I’ve never actually made a Wordpress theme before, so I did that on Sunday. I kind of succeeded. I started making a theme from the new design that I wanted to use, but then created a whole new design after that. Then I had 3 different designs in Photoshop that I liked, and now I think I am just dumping all of them and going with a pre-made theme that I will just customize how I like. I have about 15 of those I am choosing from right now.

So yeah, just little bits of web design. Once I’ve decided on the theme, most everything else is done. I still need to find out how to incorporate easyphpcalendar into a Wordpress post, but that shouldn’t be too hard (I hope). After that, it’s just thinking of new ideas. I need to sit down with a couple of people and start just thinking of things to do with this.

One month! Only one month!