Davinian

Tumbled reaches 200 downloads

Tumbled, a Wordpress theme.
click to enlarge

Today I’m celebrating as my first free Wordpress theme - Tumbled, has reached 200 downloads.

Now 200 is not a massive amount, but it still amazes me when I see it being used. It was my first attempt at designing a public theme and seems to have worked surprisingly well.

I have been meaning to update it since late last year, but never seemed to find the time. Now it has reached the 200 mark makes me want to do it as soon as possible, so stay tuned for an update soon.

Tumbled is a single column, no nonsense theme loosely based on the popular Block style on Tumblr, and can be found/downloaded here Tumbled - A Wordpress Theme.

Comment Spam - does Akismet work?

A week ago I was receiving on average 10 spam comments a day. I had Akismet running and was more than happy that it was catching all the nasties for me. But while updating a few plugins I appear to have inadvertently turned Akismet off. I didn’t realised this until today when I received an email saying I had 1 comment awaiting moderation.

I logged in to check it out, but soon realised it was only spam — strange I thought, why hadn’t Akismet caught it. Then I realised the Akismet Spam Tab was missing and then I realised I must have accidentally turned it off — but wait a minute I thought — why have I only received 1 spam comment in the last week when Akismet is turned off?

My brain is still trying to work this out, but I appear to have received more spam while Akismet was turned on. That can’t be right? Can it? I am going to turn it back on and see what happens — but I must confess I don’t have it running some of my other sites, and interestingly they hardly ever get any spam.

A question I’d like to ask is — has anybody else noticed anything weird with Akismet? Do you use it? Or perhaps some other spam catching method?

Problems and Moving House

Ok, so this is the quick version of what happened.

In the middle of moving house, I received an email from my hosting company saying my account was in violation of their Terms and Conditions.

It took ten days to get connected to the net at my new house, and by then my host had suspended my account and nothing was working.

Fortunately a good friend of mine allowed me to lug my iMac up to his house and use his internet for a day so I could sort out the mess - in short… I was using old versions of Wordpress that had vulnerabilities. A very bad idea as these vulnerabilities were being abused by someone or something which caused my T&C violation.

I had plained to return davinian to its previous state ASAP, but what with all the DIY and sorting out my new house I just haven’t had the time.

Anyway, I’m back and I think everything is sorted. I have sucessfuly moved house, and I’m now living in Dorset, not far from the coast and to be honest, enjoying having my own place again.

Tumbled - A Wordpress Theme

Tumbled, a Wordpress theme.
click to enlarge

This is my first Wordpress theme I have made publicly available, and it’s not something I have had sitting around for ages either - I started it yesterday afternoon with the soul intention of making it purely for public release.

So here goes, I would like to introduce you to Tumbled, a single column, no nonsense theme loosely based on the popular Block style on Tumblr.

Yep, that’s right, you can now have that Tumblr look on your Wordpress blog.

I must warn that Tumbled is still a Beta, but rest assured I have tested it in Safari and Firefox on the Mac, and Internet Explore 6 and 7 plus Firefox on the PC. Everything seems to work fine, although there is a slight discrepancy with the navigation in IE 6 - there always something wrong in IE 6 though isn’t there!

NOTE: A problem was found where Smiley Faces inherited the default image styling! It is recommended that everybody downloads the latest version to avoid the visual unpleasantness - sorry about that!

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