So we are sure you have noticed the schizophrenic and seemingly constant construction here at Beck’s Cafe. Thankfully our back end is stable (..and I expect NO comments from Sharon, June, Jenna or Richard on that one!)
But it’s that front end…what is going on here?
Well, we’ve moved the cafe from a standard Wordpress theme to Wordpress using Sandbox. What this means practically is that Sandbox enables some basic Internet programming stuff that we’ll need going into the future such as:
- Advanced, semantics-based theme
- Beautiful clean coding on the inside for easier feature add (or remove)
- For WordPress 2.0.2 through 2.2.x
- Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional
- Widgets plugin-friendly
- hAtom and hCard microformats (XFN was already built into Wordpress)
- Allows our readers to RSS subscribe to only one category at a time; so love Frugal Techie but hate the rest? You can subscribe just to The Frugal Tech RSS feed at Beck’s Cafe and just read those posts. It’s like 10 blogs in 1! We just love choices, just like a well designed handbag.
- You can totally customize it with CSS alone—no need (hopefully) to bother with the underlying php
So quite a bit really. Working with CSS has been alot easier than I’d thought it would be. I’d say tweaking a non-sandbox theme is actually more work. But there’s that learning curve on CSS so the changes will gradually take place here over time.
Sorry for making everyone crazy….now go have an iced cappucino and disregard all the plaster dust and plywood stacked all over the place 
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September 16, 2007 at 8:52 pm
Brenda Smith
I was wondering if I was seeing things, or if maybe my browser was waxing “flaky” on me. I’m glad that it was all intentional.
I’ve been posting a blog on Blogger, usually about once a month or so. I’m debating on setting something up in WordPress… Is it worth doing? I’m also guessing that this is hosted. Is WP management in their hands or yours?
September 16, 2007 at 9:12 pm
Rebecca
Hi Brenda!
I’ve tried blogger (in the past, not the latest), Typepad, Yahoo 360, Wordpress sefl-hosted and Wordpress @ Wordpress.com
Wordpress on a self-hosted site was the best approach for me. I found that I could do whatever I wanted to with the code (as you have witnessed) and I could choose a reliable host as well. I’ve been very happy with hosting with A Small Orange (www.asmallorange.com).
Self-hosting hasn’t been alot of work. The upload took like 15 minutes. The hardest part was choosing a theme. In my latest iteration that I’ve inflicted on you and the other readers here I’ve chosen Sandbox and to do the CSS mods myself. So, that’s meant more working on code for now, but it’s temporary and I’m learning something too. For me, it’s been worth the extra time, but honestly, after the initial install and the updates when they come out, it hasn’t been that much more time. Though I’m making slow changes to the site to pretty it up, I can just input content as easily as I did with Typepad and easier than with the old Blogger.
As for WP-Admin. I take care of all of that on my end. A Small Orange just gives me the infrastructure and tools. I take care of all the rest including back up, updating to the latest Wordpress roll and spam killing (which is a snap with Akismet).
Wordpress.com is a good alternative I think as they take care of everything, even the updates to Wordpress. You just choose the plan you want (free or paying some money to give you access to hack the CSS, get more storage, or have map to your own domain) then go from there.
Thank you for the comment, I guess I have two known readers now
~*Becki*~