New Year, New Blog Layout, New Plugins

Posted by Tejus Parikh on January 2, 2009

Some people have noticed, but siince most actually just read the RSS feed, I guess most didn’t notice. I had a few major reasons for changing the theme. I liked the custom theme that I used to have, but it was just one more thing to maintain. It got somewhat tiring keeping it up to date with newer wordpress features. It as just not something I wanted to deal with anymore. Along with this change, I’m also moving my photo galleries off of Gallery2. The reasons were the same, it was yet another system to maintain and another set of themes to keep updated. Just not worth the time and effort. I’d rather spend time uploading pictures and blogging than making css and php changes. I get enough of that kind of stuff in the day job. I half-way debated about paying for a flickr pro account. I might still go that way eventually, but I’ve been hosting my own photos since before flickr existed and I didn’t want to give up that geek cred. My criteria for new photo software is that it had to integrate with Wordpress so that I’ll only need one theme. It also had to be incredibly simple to keep up to date. Eventually I settled on the Nextgen Gallery for Wordpress. It appeared to be the most feature rich and complete gallery for Wordpress. I’ve migrated a few of my galleries and it is easy to use. Of course, it has some limitations that weren’t present in Gallery 2. It does not have an interface for rotating images. Having it so that the interface supports both the original and scaled images requires some hacking. These limitations are small compared to the work required to make two pieces of software look the same. Of course, since I was in a plugin happy mood, I added a few more. Just in case you’re interested, this is the full run-down of all the software I’m now running on this blog: Interface:

  • Aeros Theme by The BuckMaker
  • Background Image: A shot of I-75 taken by me during the snowstorm Atlanta had in 2008
Widgets: Plugins behind the scenes:

Tejus Parikh

I'm a software engineer that writes occasionally about building software, software culture, and tech adjacent hobbies. If you want to get in touch, send me an email at [my_first_name]@tejusparikh.com.

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