I get a lot of questions from people about WordPress. Whether about themes or my plugins or even more esoteric queries they continue to roll in. Unfortunately, my answer rate has somewhat dropped. Either the question has already been asked and answered, the question is asked in such a way — or in a place — that I don’t understand it, or the question is, frankly, nuts. As such it occurred to me that what might be most helpful is to help people help themselves. Trite and clichéd as it may be, it’s still a worthwhile endeavor if for no other reason than to assuage my guilt at not responding to questions.

This will start off rather basic, as some people seem to need it. If you are not that person, skip on down.

Click on the link to continue to the whole story. No, I’m not doing this for pageviews but rather because this will be loooong and I don’t want my front page taken up with it.

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Screw LightPress. I could never get it looking the way I wanted — well, to be fair, I didn’t have the patience to get it to look the way I wanted –, it didn’t work right with Markdown, and it didn’t fix my wonky Dreamhost idiocy. So, I’m back to my friggin’ design. If Dreamhost sends me a nastygram, I’ll move. We’ll see how that goes, eh?

I’ve moved this thing over to the Lightpress front end. Why? I’ve mentioned before that I’ve gotten nastygrams from Dreamhost for taking too many resources. I’ve tried many, many things, from adjusting the content of the sidebar to no longer display “most popular” and other types of things, to no longer using my Image Headlines plugin, to enabling caching, to using the Preformatted plugin and I never got the usage under control. I’m almost positive it’s a Dreamhost ineffeciency, but they won’t do anything about it preferring instead to send me nastygrams and encourage me to upgrade to their dedicated hosting for a hundred bucks a month. Sure.

I average 6,000 hits a day. Does that seem excessive to you? Does that seem like enough traffic to choke a server? Me neither. So I installed Lightpress which is a supposedly more lightweight front-end to WordPress. That forced me to downgrade to WordPress 1.5 but oh well.

So, what does this mean to you, dear reader? A couple of things.

• Some things don’t work right now. Some people can’t find posts, the archives are for poop. Someday I’ll get around to them.
• Commenting has been turned off. I had it on, LightPress supports commenting. Hell, they even provide an “anti-spam” plugin. Doesn’t appear to do much. So, I spend my time receiving emails from my installation with the 40 latest spam comments and I couldn’t be bothered anymore. When the signal to noise ratio drops below the audibility threshhold, the terrorists win. Congrats spammers! You win!

If I sound bitter or uncaring, I am right now. I have a(nother) sinus infection that’s absolutely killing me. My daughter had one of the worst “colds” we’ve experienced with her for the past 8 days including a 2:00 am trip to the ER for a nasty croup. My wife is slowly coming down with something as well. And I have a work deadline hanging over my head like a guillotine so I can’t just go home and sleep all day. So, dealing with the latest phentermine spam? Off the chart of “sick and tired of screwing with.”

Please bear with me, I’m trying to upgrade to WordPress 2.0 like all the cool kids, but I don’t have a lot of time to make it pretty. Or even to make it work correctly. So sorry.

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been using the Anonymous monospace font for programming for a long time. Now I’m trying out Bitstream’s Vera Sans Mono. Very nice, readable, clean programming font. You might want to give it a shot.

(I didn’t “discover” this font. Hat tip to Kuro5hin for the discussion.)