Category Archives: Blogging with WordPress

Information about how I create this blog with WordPress.

Shiny New Theme – Illacrimo from Design Disease

Well,

Short of paying $1400 for a fantastic Unique Theme from Unique Blog Designs, as done by ShoeMoney, John Chow, and Kieron, I have changed my theme to the Illacrimo Theme from Design Disease.

I spent some time looking around the web for Themes for this blog and was quite surprised how many exist, and also how many of these are quite bad. A lot of the themes require quite a bit of work to get them looking something like.

When the finances permit, I will go for a more unique theme and brand for this site. One alternative I have found to Unique Blog Designs is a service from the UK called PSD2HTML. These guys take a PSD design file and create standards compliant CSS and HTML code. One option they offer is to create a WordPress theme based upon your design. So, you can get a PSD design done the way you like it, and then these guys create you a WordPress template for around $300. Sounds cool and I would love to hear from anybody who has used these.

I would love to hear any comments you have about my new theme and if it works OK with your browsers. I have tested it in most and apart from a problem with the WordPress MORE tag, all seems fine.

OmniFocus for Getting Things Done, I Just Bought It!

OmniFocus

Hey, I’m back, hope you missed me!

Had a break from blogging, but not from Getting Things Done and now it is time to get back to the action. Just upgraded this site to the shiny new WordPress 2.3.1, broke a few things, tested my PHP knowledge but the site is up and running again. Been away from blogging for a few months and now there are tons more cool SEO and other WordPress plugins. The upgrade to 2.3.1 also sees the introduction of Widgets, rather than my old K2 sidebar modules.I am also using K2 v 0.9.1 as the theme for this site, but I now see that 0.9.6 is out, so I feel a change is due. Mind you, I feel like getting a shiny new look and feel for this site and going for it! Probably go to 0.9.6 by the time you read this post.

So, what has been going on in the world of Andrew Mason. Well, as I blogged about a while back, I left a company which I founded in 2001 back in Jan of 07. I then set up a company called RandomStorm. RandomStorm is a vulnerability management company, in brief, we check your external and internal networks for any known security and configuration vulnerabilities. Been busy building this up over the past few months, really having to put my GTD skills to the test, but I am glad to say that it is now going really well and the future for RandomStorm is looking very good. I got a few good ideas for some new posts, and I even fancy creating Mind Maps for the whole of the Getting Things Done book. I don’t think anybody else has done this so may be a pretty cool thing to do.

Well, back to the title of this post, which is about the fact that I have just pre-registered for OmniFocus, from the OmniGroup. Those of you who have followed this blog will already know that I am an avid user of Mac OSX, and would not Get Things Done on any other OS. I am going to write more about my first twelve months with GTD in another post so I will keep this quite brief but I have been using a trust pen, moleskine, and iGTD as my GTD system of choice for the past six months, with great success. I have found quite a few limitations with iGTD and the fact that they seem to have stopped in it’s development spurned me into looking at OmniFocus. iGTD used to be updated like all the time, and there have been no updates at all over the past few months. This may be because work is underway with iGTD2. Now, I have always been a huge believer in the fact that it is the system that works for you, and not the software application. A trusty pen and paper used well, is better than the most advanced techno PDA or smartphone with the latest GTP application on it, if it is not used correctly. OmniFocus has been very well supported in the GTD community and Merlin Mann of 43Folders.com has been one of the OmniFocus team for quite a while, adding his own little slant on how it should work. All in all, should make for a cool app.

So, I am busy this week transferring my next actions, projects, and contexts from iGTD to OmniFocus. I will give it a go and see how I get on with it, and obviously, report all findings here on my blog.

Getting Things Done – Read This Blog On Your iPhone

GTD iPhoneI have just enabled iPhone support on the Did I Get Things Done? blog.

So, for those of you fortunate to own an iPhone, you can now browse this blog in Safari on the phone and it is perfectly formed for your iPhone.

To do this, I enabled the iPhone Plugin from Content Robot.

Works a treat and even though the browser support in iPhone is awesome, this little plugin works a treat and really improves the user experience.

125 Code Snippets for Web Designers

I know this is not GTD related but I found a blog that had linked to DidIGetThingsDone.com and they had a cool blog entry that has 125 cool code snippets for web designers.

Now I know a lot of my readers are fellow bloggers and these types of code snippets will work fine within WordPress so I thought I would share the tips here as well as saving to delicious etc..

I hope you enjoy this find.

Cool Little App – TextExpander (Mac)

TextExpanderI recently discovered a great application that is saving me a ton of time. This is called TextExpander, from SmileOnMyMac.

I discovered this application after watching MacBreak Episode 63, which has Merlin Mann covering TextExpander.

Merlin has also posted a new blog item about using TextExpander to help with Amazon associate information in Blogs.

Be sure to check these links out and give TextExpander a try, if you are lucky enough to own a Mac that is!

WordPress Plugin – Admin Tiger

I have just added the Admin Tiger plugin for WordPress 2.0 from orderedlist.com

This is a fantastic WordPress plugin that vastly improves the look and feel of the WordPress Administration pages.

The current default WordPress administration area is functional, but I felt it could be improved. For several reasons, I didn’t want to touch the XHTML framework of the admin, but instead relied on the power of CSS2 to manipulate the presentation. The whole package has been wrapped up into a single plugin. Just install and activate. The new design will be immediately visible.

Be sure to check it out, you will not be disappointed.

Learning the Blogging Way

Well, the Blog has been running for three days now and I am averaging around 70 visitors per day. Over the next week I am going to focus on improving the way the blog operates.

I have been given an eBook by Joel Comm that covers Blog optimization so I will be introducing a lot of the concepts that Joel mentions in the book that appears upon first reading to be very good. As always, if anybody reading this has any comments on my Blog, or advice that can give, I would be very grateful for comments sharing their information.

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How am I doing this?

I have built up a bit of knowledge of Blogging by creating three blogs already. These are DDoS Info, WII Injury, and Mac Beginners. All of these are on TypePad. I have also played with Blogger for another personal Blog.

This blog is using WordPress. I am new to WordPress but look forward to using a system that provides more functionality as I found TypePad to be extremely restrictive.

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