I’ve given my blog a facelift with a new WordPress theme made from scratch.  The old purple theme is no more, replaced by a new blue theme (blue being the internet color for "tech" of course).

I’ve also released a modified version of it (minus some of the ads and plugins) over at Crane Factory.  You can check it out here .

Over at Crane Factory I’ve taken a first look at some of the new features of WordPress 2.6 .  If you’re considering the upgrade (and you should be) take a read of my post and see the new bits in action.

I’m taking a break from my normal posting about Exchange servers to announce the launch of my new website www.cranefactory.com.

Crane Factory is a website all about web development, WordPress, and blogging.  These are hobbies as opposed to my day job which inspires most of the content here.  I’ll be posting regularly on how to get the most out of WordPress for everyone from beginners to experienced users using practical examples, and even including some of my own WordPress themes that I am developing.

Check out www.cranefactory.com and subscribe to my RSS feed!

I am posting this using Windows Live Writer, a free application from Microsoft that you can use for writing your blog posts and publishing them to WordPress, Windows Live Spaces, SharePoint, and many other blogging platforms.

I hadn’t considered trying Windows Live Writer until I read this post on BloggingTips.com. That day I downloaded the program and installed it on my laptop, and I was immediately impressed at some of the ways in which it makes my WordPress posting a lot easier and more enjoyable.

Read the rest of this article…

I upgraded my Wordpress websites yesterday to 2.2, using Fantastico to perform the upgrade. In both cases the sites started displaying this character (Â) anywhere in the posts where I had used a double-space (eg at the end of a sentence).

The solution is identified here.

Edit the wp-config.php file.

Comment out the two lines:

define(’DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);
define(’DB_COLLATE’, ”);

By putting // in front of both lines like so:

//define(’DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);
//define(’DB_COLLATE’, ”);