For the past few weeks, Gravatar images have been running very slowly due to the increasingly massive amount of requests they process. A forthcoming update to their infrastructure should provide much improved responsiveness, and in turn speed up loading of individual posts here at Command-Tab. With any luck, the transition should be seamless, allowing existing plugins to work without requiring changes. We’ll see.

I just completed the WordPress 2.0.1 upgrade I’ve been avoiding for a week or more, put off by the structural changes I might have to make to get everything working again. Surprisingly, the upgrade took mere minutes and went off without a hitch. Did I ever mention how much I love WordPress?

While I was in the process of tidying up, I also fixed the ugly /index.php/post-name/ addressing system I used previously. For the time being, I’ve fixed all past posts with a rather large .htaccess hack, hinting to browsers and search engines that the content has permanently moved to a new address (HTTP code 301). All old links should point to their new locations, and the new system should work as well.

If anyone happens to notice something broken around here, a comment or email would be appreciated so I can get to fixing it!

WordPress 2.0 is almost here and sports a long list of new features, including the Akismet antispam plugin I rave about, as well as a backup plugin to keep your site safe. I can’t wait to upgrade, and may do a bit of a redesign shortly after (my CSS is ridiculous in size, and is still broken here and there). Having messed with a number of blogging systems on my own machine, I can yet again highly recommend WordPress for its two-minute installation, nearly infinite customizability, and overall ease of use.

A number of people have asked me how to go about creating a custom WordPress theme — should they create it from scratch? Modify an existing theme? Performancing.com has a great introduction to customizing WordPress and making your blog look how you want. While I didn’t follow it to make this site, I did use the same method of duplicating the default WP theme, then modifying it to suit my needs. Luckily, WordPress’ PHP template tags make editing much simpler by removing the majority of the necessary code and breaking each important bit of data into single tags. (When you’re done with that, check out part 2.)

(On an unrelated note, please forgive the lack of recent updates. Not too long ago, I finally got myself a full time job and have been rather busy with it. I’ll do my best to keep the tech coming!)