However, sometimes comments that are plainly legit, and/or are from friends or family, and/or don’t seem to meet any of the above criteria are still held for moderation. I’m not sure why, and it’s annoying, but I wanted to make everyone aware. I wish I could individually grant a specific visitor “a free pass”, but WordPress doesn’t do that (yet). So if your comments are held for moderation inexplicably it’s probably not your fault.

And speaking of spam, Negative99 just passed over 150,000 spam comments caught by the great Akismet spam filter.

This is a snazzy dark grey theme with splashes of greenery (hence the name). The original template is an open-source design by Pat Heard from FullAhead.org.

I have included, as of Version 2.0, an Adobe Photoshop template file that allows the painless creation of custom theme “middle-space” images (hint: the “middle-space” is the large section between the main content and the sidebar that has lots of “greenery” in it).

I get lots of questions on this theme surrounding the menu tabs at the top. By default only a few choices are shown (homepage, about page, and the archives) because, quite frankly, there’s not a lot of real-estate up there to be showing a dozen page tabs – and there’s a secondary navigation in the sidebar that shows ALL pages. However, I have included all the PHP code you’d need (inside the header.php file) to allow your pages to be tabbed up top.

[DOWNLOAD] v2.2 – 17 JUL 08 – 732kB

[LIVE DEMO]

This is a clean, snappy theme that is a conversion of the public domain template by the same name designed by the folks at SixShooterMedia. I really liked the style and class of this template so I converted it just for fun. I intend on periodicaly updating it with small tweaks and improvements.

[DOWNLOAD] v1.6 – 17 JUL 08 – 37kB

[LIVE DEMO]

Clean, classy, and crimson… that’s the best way to describe this theme. It supports widgets and discriminating tastes, and as you can see it’s fairly light with a fine classy polish. The navigation tabs add some transparent wow, and the look and feel is easy to sink into. This latest version of the theme took me quite a bit of time to tweak just the way I liked it, so I hope you enjoy.

[DOWNLOAD] v1.5 – 17 JUL 08 – 138kB

[LIVE DEMO]

One of MANY, MANY reviews I’ve received:

I’ve looked at hundreds of WordPress themes, and I have to say, Crimson Sunrise is the most technically advanced I’ve seen yet.

- If you add pages, it adds tabs to the top.
- It comes with built in functions for doing things you’d normally have to hunt the Codex for
- It Looks GREAT

Either way, I think I’ve found my new favourite theme for WordPress.

My site supports what are called gravatars, or globally recognized avatars. Your gravatar is basically a small, square picture that follows you from blog to blog appearing beside your name when you comment on a gravatar-enabled website. There are many, many websites that support gravatars… and version 2.5 of WordPress (the most prevalent blogging software on the internet) was recently released with gravatar support built-in.

On Negative99, you will see gravatars used in the comments section of my blog posts. I have included a sample screen capture here of some blog comments… I have marked people who have an active gravatar image with a green arrow, and those that don’t with a red one. You can see that the default placeholder for someone without a gravatar is a light-gray, androgynous silhouette. Don’t let this be you!

Signing up for a gravatar is FREE and painless. All you need is your email address. You’ll be able to upload any image you like and perform zoom and crop functions inside their website. You can also “store” more than one gravatar for later use – I have five gravatars that I’ll rotate through when I get bored. It can’t get much easier.

As I stated in an earlier post (while alpha-testing the software) this is a major software upgrade with a gazillion improvements. As with any massive change there will be some broken WordPress themes and plugins to fix… but the sunshine on the horizon is nearly blinding. I really can’t wait to dive in on this release and start developing websites. I think the huge upgrades to the design and operation of the administration interface is paramount to customer adoption and usability (every developer knows that user self-sustainability cannot be over-stated, period).

And if the new release wasn’t enough, the WordPress website itself just got a sweet redesign too! Very nice, Matt!

From Matt Mullenweg‘s official announcement:

WordPress 2.5, the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community, people just like you. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.

Here are some stats from Peter Westwood that he just posted about:

WordPress 2.5 has been released and includes a huge number of changes over the WordPress 2.3 series. Rather than list the changes in detail which would probably take me some days to write out I offer the following statistics and information about the WordPress 2.5 release:

• In development for 185 days (6 months 3 days to be precise).
• Changes to 364 files with 54008 insertions, and 29136 deletions for more detail you can view the diffstat output.
• Patches committed from over 110 different contributors.
• Over 1300 individual changes made for more detail you can view a complete changelog.

I love WordPress. I use it for several websites (including the one you’re reading and my personal site). It is easy to use, very extensible, is open source, and you can find metric-butt-tonnes of plugins and ready-made themes for it. As a developer and designer I have been able to create websites whose very core functionality is purely built on WordPress and its hefty list of extras built by the masses for creative goodness sake. Trés cool.

Now, version 2.5 really does to the next level. The back-end admin interface is completely rethought from an admin’s perspective. The design is yet more intuitive than before, and the added features blow your mind. How about single click plugin version upgrades? Built-in Gravatars and photo galleries? Pretty sweet.

It’s still in alpha (I keep telling myself) so you won’t see it on Negative99 for a while… and even when you do you might now be able to appreciate from the front all the beauty and genius that went into the inner-workings and into the back-end… but trust me, it’s there.

Here’s a snippet from WeblogToolsCollection.com.

WordPress Development Blog: 2.5 Sneak Peek I love the staccato description Matt uses to start the post: A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times sound interesting? The first Release Candidate for WordPress 2.5 is out for those that have been waiting patiently to try out the new features. Matt details out the updates and the new features of 2.5 on the development blog and the good news is spreading in the WordPress circles.

Another article from BlogHerald article.

As a note of trivia, currently I have had 67,814 spam comments caught by Akismet before they could see light-of-day.

I had only ever been to Walt Disney World (WDW) as a kid… and we went to Magic Kingdom. What I didn’t realize is present day WDW is the size of a county! This sucker is big… and the grounds were immaculately kept up. We stayed at a resort called Coronado Springs, and it was filled candy for my digital camera. I must say it was hard to appreciate all the work that must go into keeping that place looking so lush and green.

The following is a smattering of photos I took while in Orlando and Cancun (and you can always see the whole gallery on my main site by clicking here):

In the end I decided to wrap everything about me into one site. The design had to be bold and vivacious, yet clean and classy. Light on dark was a given. In the end, my nuclear engineering roots provided the inspiration for the design (hence the magenta trifoil and glowing green). I titled it, Nuclear Magic.

However, this new website not only serves as my personal site but was also a great proof-of-concept for using WordPress as a CMS. WordPress is widely regarded as the premiere blogging software… but its potential as a CMS is profound. So many web designers and developers already have WordPress blogs and are familiar with skinning and modding them… and the administrator interface is easy-to-use. Pound for pound you won’t get more bang for your buck when developing a dynamic website. WordPress works great, is free, and is easier to use for what it does than anything else I’ve ever even heard of.

Everything you see at SteveMooradian.com that is not part of the site’s physical design is dynamic. This is extremely significant. ALL images are called out in CSS or in MySQL… not the source files. All main textual content is stored in MySQL. On my Web Design, Programming, and Guitar & Music pages the lists of sites, projects, and bands (respectively) are all WordPress posts with categories matching the page title. The links at the bottom of every non-Home page are actual WordPress “Blogroll” links with categories matching the page title. Except for the Home and Gallery pages, each page is built from identical PHP code!

All my coding was done using Notepad++. All graphic work in the design was created by myself using Adobe’s Photoshop and Fireworks software. All markup is valid XHTML 1.0 and CSS3. All of the site conforms to 508 and WAI-A accessibility standards. All dynamic content is semantic. NO TABLES!

I designed the site using progressive enhancement so that I could be search-engine friendly and accessible while also providing a rich user experience to those with Flash and JavaScript-enabled browsers. Examples of progressive enhancement are as follows: I used sIFR to style my headings for users with Flash-enabled browsers. NO images were used for any headings on my site. I used swfIR to style most of my content images for users with Flash-enabled browsers. All drop-shadows and rounding on content images happen dynamically. I used GreyBox for all in-browser popups and image popup galleries for users with JavaScript-enabled browsers.

My new site has already been featured on many CSS and web design galleries… including a prestigious “Editor’s Pick” on the W3CSites.com gallery (which requires strict adherence to valid markup and web accessibility).

In terms of XHTML and CSS I had to rewrite some style to fix the layout of my theme. This custom-made theme I use employs very complex style markup and thus is very sensitive to change, and the upgrade to version 2.1 brought on some small syntax changes.

And then of course there was some PHP I had to rewrite… mostly because version 2.1 handles pages differently in the database schema.

And then I had to patch up my Jumps pages because version 2.1 totally handles link categories differently and also deprecated some primary link PHP functions.

Wow… I guess it was a lot of work now that I think about it.

This has been a bit of a crazy year. I am now on new servers for Negative99 so there’ll be no more limited availabilities or shying away from blogging due to bandwidth issues… I have about 50 times the bandwidth I did before for the SAME PRICE!

I’m also finally using the latest version of WordPress (2.0.5) and have resolved to do all my posting in FireFox where I have automatic spell checking. It’s a beautiful thing.

My major task this first month of the year is to “reboot” my site. I plan on designing a new look and feel that I hope better reflects my growth as a web designer and my relative webview of the world.

See you all soon!

So, you may be wondering why there’s not wallpaper here for Wallpaper Wednesday? Well… in the name of doing-my-own-thing I am going to break that months-old tradition and just toss out wallpapers whenever the heck I feel like it. Nobody really comments on wallpaper, anyway, so if you wanted wallpaper you could go to a REAL wallpaper site, like Digital Blasphemy or any others I have linked here.

There will be biting and jovial cynicism here soon enough.

Okay, so I’m back from Cancun and I had a great time. The all-inclusive vacations are the way to go. You sit back by the pool and short Mexicans keep bringing you island cocktails as you listen to the waves roll against the beach just a stone’s throw away.

The photo on the left was the view from our hotel room. Pretty rough, huh? It was just a little different from the view we had in our Siberian living quarters. We stayed at a beautiful place on the main hotel strip.

Now I must say that on the news I hear about calamities that come and go and they happen wherever and as long as they’re not happening to me then my mind does not commit them to memory (except maybe for the Indonesia tsunami or something like that). Well, Hurricane Wilma from October 2005 had long since left my memory… but upon landing in Cancun my memory had to be jogged. The place was really a mess. Not everything, but anything off the beaten trail had serious hurricane damage. Entire stretches of swamp forest were ripped apart and mangroves were strewn about. Several of the resorts along the main strip where we were staying were still shutdown from the storm. As we walked along the beach we could see large construction teams working on the vacant resorts.

I’ll save the topless beaches for the next post.

It was dry… twelve percent humidity is only good if you have lunger. There are many perverts who are rich and like to gamble… they were stumbling around drunk almost everywhere. If you want the proverbial $4.99 lobster dinner you have to wander into very “shady” areas… because on the classier portions of The Strip the idea of cheap food (or cheap anything) is a farce.

I’ll have to post on exhorbitance soon, because it was everywhere and it needs to be analyzed. What is too much? Vegas prides itself on excess… on being the fastest, glitziest, gawdiest, hottest place around. I saw a lady while in line at the café (in the Bellagio) who wore a nine carat diamond ring!? It was ginormous and looked so ridiculously big that in any other venue I’d peg it as fake without another thought. Another woman (working as hostess of the café) casually remarked how she had lost her 4-carat stone on her ring. There was enough bling to rebuild Solomon’s Temple a few hundred times over.

And not to be outdone… the silicone was abundant. Dare I say there were more plastic breasts than at a mannequin factory. And the outfits were meant to display the goods… but much good would it do them with all the attention-snatching skin ads found in nearly every degree of a full geometric arc. I couldn’t imagine being a woman trying to maintain some sense of self-esteem about my body in Vegas. I couldn’t imagine bringing kids to Vegas, either.

Now, for a place sure to be hit with fire and brimstone I have to say it was beautiful. The massive money machine can buy lush gardens, groundskeeping, and landscaping like nowhere else. I could have spent the whole time taking pictures if I wanted. Speaking of… here are a few shots from my Vegas 06 photoset:

Primary places visited (there were many more we minorly visited): The Paris, The Venetian, The Bellagio (our favorite), Mandalay Bay and its Shark Reef, and the Las Vegas Hilton and its Star Trek: The Experience.

I have to just say that February was a very good month for Negative99. For whatever reason my web traffic shot up… I had thousands of visitors… and even my piddly excuse for a few Google ads have almost made my site self-sustaining (i.e. paying for the hosting costs). So whoever you are… thanks! In the coming months I’ll be putting up more wallpapers and Flash games. And more WordPress themes are on the way. And I’ll ensure reading my blog makes you look healthy and more vibrant… and thinner… and younger…

As promised above, and in the wake of my post yesterday – Islam is a blast!, I have gathered some political cartoon goodies from Daryl Cagle’s website of professional political cartoonists. These are some good reflections of my own thoughts on this matter (especially the third one). Enjoy!

Click to view my whole political cartoon gallery.

…don’t confuse a blog with a forum. They are different beasts. Their human-machine interface is (or rather should be) different. A blog does not usually make for a good forum. I hate to do this, but take WordPress.org for instance… this support section is really used as a forum, but in a blog format… IMHO, it is not the correct solution.

Forum software usually lists MANY threads going on and they are usually in order of when they were started. This has a few benefits. If you are returning to a specific thread you can remember when abouts it falls in the timeline so you can find it again. Have you ever tried finding a previous thread here with search? Good luck. And if you return to a forum thread it usually has a marker indicating it has new content… which for forum threads is easier than marking threads with new content by physically moving their position. Moving blog posts around to show activity only confuses the matter. Posts that could be very valuable are susceptible to being pushed into irrelevancy by newer ones, and the older valuable posts become lost. I see this time and again on this site, as well as a hoard of others. This is part of the reason why people ask the same questions over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over….

Forum software sometimes allows the ability to reorder comments in the threads by search relevancy, commenter rating, value points awarded, and some other ways. Not usually blogging software… but that’s fine because that’s not what blogs are for. A blog… short for weblog (coined many years ago by some guy who now doesn’t have a lot of money – seriously), is a different entity with a different user paradigm from a forum… with different purposes and different use case models.

Forum software works poorly for a blog, and blogging software works poorly for a forum. If you want to get sketchy and claim that modifications and subtle user interface customizations could turn a blogging software (like WordPress) into a forum-viable platform, then I would suggest that you are merely using the generic database query engine as a back-tier and rewriting the blog software to instead act as a forum front-tier. Basically, coding forum software into a blog so it’s no longer a blog. So in essence you aren’t using the blogging software anymore for your forum. Otherwise, any solution requiring text entries could use blogging software… CMSs, Forums, B2Bs, and the list goes on.

I know that a person does not need a master’s degree in IT to understand this… but mine sure helps me.