I recently finished work on Jeff Warren’s everything and anything website jeffwarren.org.

He wanted to be able to make “pages” about all the various projects that he has worked on over the years and to put of the pages into “category” buckets. He was also clear that he didn’t want a blog. He was asking for a lot and he didn’t want to spend very much putting it together so I figured that Wordpress would be his best option – but how do you make Wordpress not act like a blog? It turned out to be a lot simpler than I had expected.

I started with the ADreamToHost theme as a base and then got to work stripping out all the “blog” like aspects from the code – comments, user account creation, etc – and then I started adding in some unique and helpful plugins. For sorting categories and giving them icons I used plugins called Category Icons, My Category Order, and Category Visibility. This allowed Jeff to easily add, edit, and remove categories icons and change the order of categories on his site. All that had to be done then was to alter the Main Index Template to show categories instead of blog posts like so:

<?php if (function_exists(‘put_cat_icons’)) put_cat_icons( wp_list_categories(‘orderby=order&hierarchical=0′.’&echo=0′),’icons_only=true’); else wp_list_categories(‘orderby=order&hierarchical=0′); ?>

Jeff also wanted to be able to have visitors sign up for an email newsletter for which I installed the Newsletter and WP-Mail-SMTP plugins. Newsletter is an extremely robust and thorough plugin that handles subscribes and unsubcribes through email confirmations as well as the actual batch mailing to all of your signed up subscribers.

For embedding media into his posts I installed QuickTime Embed, Smart Youtube, and the Audio player plugin.

Jeff came up with the look and feel of the main page layout and I used the ADreamToHost template as a base for all of the sub pages.

Overall I found the majority of the chosen plugins to be very easy to work with.

Jeff’s site is hosted on Dreamhost.

20.6% of Ethan Allens visits in October 2009 came from Internet Explorer 6 web browsers – 3.5% more than IE8 and 3.5% less than IE7. Internet Explorer as a whole registered nearly 62% of all visits to the site. I expect that there are quite a few IE6 users on systems that can’t be upgraded to IE7 – Windows 95, 98, Me and 2000. I have a feeling that we will see a significant decline in IE6 numbers after this holiday season but it’s going to persist at around 10% for quite a while. Maybe years. It will go down in history as the browser that never died.

One strategy is to encourage IE6 users on none IE7/8 capable systems to upgrade to Firefox. Pop up an overlay when they visit the site explaining to them that their browsing experience will be greatly enhanced if they switch to the Firefox or Chrome browsers. If enough websites start doing this then people will start getting the message.

Or maybe not.

Until the day comes when IE6 hits some magical number where clients will say enough is enough the coders can continue pulling their hair out.

This is an early (and one time -- it was taken apart on November 1st) version of this blinky lights thing that I’m working on. It uses an Arduino Mega, 13 macetech MegaBrites, an 4x20 LCD display, 4 rotary encoders, a power supply and a lot of wire. It’s meant to light up parties. My original intent was to make a 4X6 grid to hang on a ceiling but after sticking the lights to balloons and hanging it vertically I think I may, instead, make two vertical 16 -- 20 light pendants to hang on either side of a DJ. Hopefully I’ll have a more finalized version ready in the next month or so.

Sorry about the recording. I tried to redo it but my phone died on the second attempt so we get this muffled portrait view version instead. Oops.