I’m getting the itch to change my blog theme again. But I’m having trouble finding anything I like.

I have a number of themes installed, and they are all very good, but none of them is quite what I’m looking for. For example, I have PhotoSky and Dignity from ThemeBox.org, GlossyBlue by N.Design Studio,  GreenWave from the Romow Web Directory, TerraFirma by Sadish Bala - and of course, RedWave (the current theme I’m using) from AskGraphics.

Other than not using themes that have a black background and white text (too harsh on my eyes), I’m pretty open - though of course it’s personal taste.

So… anyone have any suggestions?

Well, I took the plunge and upgraded to WordPress 2.5.

I’m actually quite surprised - I didn’t look at any of the release candidates, so the new style (for the admin interface) is totally new to me. I have to say I’m quite taken with it (although I did switch back to the “classic” color scheme).

And I have to say I LOVE the new media browser controls - much better for handling pictures, music, and videos embedded in a blog (as I so often do).

Although my configuration seems to be limited somehow - I get errors when uploading image files during the “Crunching” process. I’m not sure what it is; it may be a PHP memory limit on my server. If anyone’s run into this and diagnosed it successfully before, please drop a note in the comments - I’d appreciate it.

In the meantime, I’ve got work to do - upgrading the themes here and over at the Bun’s blog to allow the use of the now-built-in Gravatars. Fun!

We’re on a roll, now! And now, some OS-tan related wallpapers. Enjoy!

In case anyone was wondering, yes, I’ve been fiddling with the “default thumbnail size” setting in WordPress. It’s hard-coded in, unfortunately - I think it should be a user-setting.

So I’ve been experimenting with WordPress’s new built-in “tags” feature. It’s pretty neat, but it’s not 100% awesome.

For one thing, I’ve got nearly 1,000 posts on this blog so far. Going back and trying to add tags to existing posts is a PAIN IN THE ASS.

Secondly, I find that often the tags I would associate with a post are just the names of the categories I’ll be posting in - so what’s the point? And when you get down to it, tags are basically just categories on crack.

Thirdly, it can be hard to think up tags. I’m not good at it. I have put a lot of tags in back-articles; I’m sure I could have chosen better tags for lots of things. And I’m sure I’ll continue to choose bad tags that only confuse people. Le sigh.

Finally, and this isn’t really a jab at the tagging system itself, but the tag widget I use will completely crap itself if you set the minimum and maximum font sizes to be exactly the same. I thought I would set them to be the same so all the tag links were the same size (I’m not sure I like the different sized items in the “tag cloud” idea), but when I did, I got all sorts of “division by zero” errors on the page and I had to switch it back. Not a big deal, really, but still.

So, I will continue to experiment with tags as time goes by. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I direct your attention to a recent post of mine. A look at it from the main page shows “Comments (3)”, but when you actually look at the comments, there are only 2.

Looking at the WordPress admin panel shows the same thing. It thinks there are 3 comments, but there are only 2. What’s going on?

I’ve looked into the issue a little bit, and found a few things:

• Some people have this problem because they manually delete comments. (I don’t; I use Akismet and the built-in WordPress tools to moderate comments.)
• Some people reported the problem, but they are all hosted on the WordPress.com site (I obviously am not; I’m self-hosted here at starkeith.net.)
• I’ve read claims that the bug is fixed. I’m running the most recent version of WordPress - so why is it still happening?

Anyone care to comment on this one? I’m stumped!