MonkeyBit.Com

Information is something you always need and never seem to have the perfect place to store all that you have. If you are like me you find all sorts of great sites as you click around the web just bursting with information you really want to keep. Now that I am seriously attempting to develop this blog, I need a place to store all those great pages of information I find. Things like “Six Top Linking Strategies” from JohnChow.Com or the “23 Ideas for finding new readers for your blog” by Darrin Rowse from ProBlogger.

I have tried lots of online services, Pocket PC devices, BlackBerries and tons of other ways to keep the information readily available but most fell miserably short of what I needed. Since I travel a great deal I am often on any number of machines when I visit the web and that just complicates the issue even more. Up until today I hadn’t found a one size fits all type solution but luckily I finally stumbled on it and it was right under my fingers the whole time.

Wordpress has a nifty little thing called Pages that most people (including myself) use to generate pages of info that fall outside the normal realm of posts. Well if you SAVE these pages versus PUBLISHing them, they don’t get automatically added to your navigation bar but are still readily available for you to use as needed. Solution! Best of all I can create and access these pages from anywhere. Perfect!

I know I am not the first person to discover the pages portion of Wordpress and more than likely not the first one to use it in this way but at least for now I am glowing with the knowledge that I solved a plaguing issue without tons of cash or countless hours mashing something together. If you have a Wordpress blog (and if you don’t you need to get one!) then give these pages a try. I bet you will be as happy with the outcome as I am.

I have decided to redo the template theme and color scheme for the site. The Fresh theme was just too… perky for my liking. Nothing against that theme it looked great and worked even better, I simply decided that I wanted a bit more of a muted layout. A quick look at themes.wordpress.net and I found MistyLook 3.1 an awesome theme straight off the download. Of course it was still a bit bright so I played around with the style.css and changed the color scheme to one that used very few colors. Basically I changed the B (RGB) setting for Black (#000000) by 30% each time and laid out what I think is a rather nice scheme. I also applied an orange to highlight certain areas to give it a bit of pop.

I am still not 100% happy with the colors so there might be a few more adjustments but basically I am going to try and stick with the more muted colors and see if I can make something decent. Big thank yous to the creators of MistyLook 3.1 and Fresh. Both of these are awesome themes and I highly recommend them to anyone looking for a new Wordpress theme.

I have been having a fit trying to get Pretty Permalinks set for the site. Everything I tried just seemed to make matters worse. The only thing that would work intitially was putting :

/index.php/%pagename%/

This to me was not a good solution, I wanted to have just /%pagename%/. Finally after mucking around with all the different solutions offered in the forums and multiple websites, I fixed it by accident, or rather by chance. My .htaccess file had the following:

# END WordPress
# BEGIN WordPress
ifmodule
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
/ifmodule

Well my server certainly didn’t like this bit of code so on the off chance, that I really couldn’t muck it up any more than it already was, I removed the

ifmodule
/ifmodule

And amazingly enough it worked like a charm. Now I have nice Pretty Permalinks. Oh note those if statements were in <> but I had to take them out for the posting.