Daniel J. Summers » Charter Member of the VRWC

Version

The current version of this blog is 4.1. (What does that mean? See the history / change log below…)

Rules of the House

This is my house. I pay for the hosting space, the domains, and spend my leisure time upgrading and tweaking this site. I don’t think they’re too awfully restrictive.

• Keep Your Language Clean. While there may be topics discussed that would push a movie over the “G” rating, they will be discussed with non-offensive language.
• Respect Is Required. With the topics posted here, discussion and debate can be expected. However, this must not degenerate into flame wars or disrespect. Even if someone posts something disrespecting me, let me take care of it. I’m a big boy – I can handle it.
• Editorial Rights Are Reserved. I reserve the right to modify or remove posts and comments, in the course of enforcing the rules above. I will not change words around to alter the original intent of the post, but I will redact offensive language or completely remove disrespectful posts.

If you don’t like these rules, then hop over to WordPress.com and sign up for your own free blog. I don’t care what you do in your house.

History / Change Log

12 Jan 2008 (version 4.1) – I changed the default theme from “NightLight Idea” to “Mimetastic,” a clean, single-column theme.

13 Oct 2007 (version 4) – The solo effort in authoring this blog was turned into a team effort. However, I remain a charter member of the VRWC… While not a technical upgrade of any sort, this does represent a significant change.

28 Sep 2007 (version 3.2) – After upgrading to WordPress 2.3, I began looking for a different theme. I found the “Nightlight Idea” theme, and customized it with my prior plug-ins. I deployed it, along with a theme switcher that allows users to change between the old and new themes, as well as the default and classic WordPress themes. I also relaxed the registration requirement for comments, as Akismet‘s spam protection had impressed me enough to trust it.

18 Jun 2007 (version 3.1) – After using WordPress for a year, I began to dig into the plug-ins that were available. I was particularly interested in a plug-in that would allow posts to be shared on Digg, StumbleUpon, etc. I also grabbed a few that identify commentors and their software.

1 Jun 2006 (version 3) – Version 2 had been better, but it still had a long way to go before it would be a viable blogging platform. Two years later, having still coded no new features, I noticed that my web host offered 1-click installation of WordPress, and I decided to give it a shot. I was hooked – it rocked! (Still does, actually…) I was able to take my old posts and enter them through WordPress’s interface, categorizing them and back-dating them so the original sequence was preserved. I launched version 3 as the first version of this blog to run on WordPress, bringing categories, search capability, comments, and RSS feeds (while deployed, no less).

13 Jul 2004 (version 2) – As I used version 1, I realized the limitations of this technique, and decided to try to write something myself; it would be a learning experience, and give me something better than what I had before. I launched version 2 as a new database-centric version, along with a style sheet upgrade.

4 Aug 2003 (version 1) – This blog was created by Daniel as a place to post his views and opinions on a wide range of topics. It was static HTML, and did not allow commenting.