GrandSlambert

Well, what a surprise it was today when the FedEx guy knocked on the door and handed me a box with the Dell logo on it. That was an extremely fast two to three day shipping time. Guess I complained enough to get them to ship it next day air. Sure was nice of them, though I had already accepted that I may not get it until next week some time. Of course, had they cared enough and did this on the first call, I would have had the drive two days ago. It is interesting that the machine came with a Hitachi drive but they shipped Seagate. Not that I am complaining, I prefer Seagate over the Hitachi any day.

What was really nice to see is that they actually listened when I asked them to ship a blank drive, since I would have needed to wipe it anyway to get rid of the crap they add. What was even more of a surprise then getting the drive is the restore disk that came with the machine is really nothing more then a Windows Vista install disk. This means I can partition the drive in two so I can run a dual boot with Linux and only have to boot into Windows when I need to run a Windows specific program. I guess I cannot complain about Dell any more, they do understand the customer, just wish it did not have to take three phone calls and an online chat to get a hard drive shipped.

New! Dell Netbooks As Low As $349.99. Valid 7/5-7/11

What has happened to tech support at Dell? For over 10 years I have been a very happy customer of Dell and have recommended it to everyone. Recently I purchased a new Studio XPS 16 laptop, and for the most part I am extremely happy with it. Until this week.

On Monday I was having problems with Windows Vista, see my previous post. I blamed it on a faulty operating system because, well, it’s Windows. Later that day the machine stopped working so I decided to reboot, only to end up with a black screen. I tried everything I could think of to fix it, but with no luck. So I called tech support. After going through all the stuff I had already done, we finally ran a confidence check on the drive to verify the hard drive was dead. Good, ready to rock now, right?

WRONG! Even though I had registered the machine when I bought it in May, it was still not registered to me. So I filled out the registration form again, and the tech I was talking to also submitted all the information. This was done late Monday evening. I was told I would be called about the replacement. Nothing on Tuesday.

Finally, around 2:00 today, after hearing nothing from Dell, I called back. No record of my call on Monday and the machine still was not registered in my name. The tech on the phone puts me on hold, and two minutes later the call was dropped. So I figure I would try an online chat. Even though I gave the test results to the tech on the chat, he or she still wanted me to try and reinstall Windows. Hmm, why hadn’t I thought of that? Because you can’t install Windows on a dead hard drive. I even tried loading Ubuntu Linux on the drive and it also verified a bad hard drive.

So what does the technician on the chat do? He or she tells me to register the machine! Again! I refused, so then I was asked for my information, which I assume means they will try to register it again. Then I was told they would ship the drive to me in two to three business days. Great, so I have a $1400 brick for another half a week.

Finally, the tech asks me “Would you mind sparing 2 minutes to have a word with my Supervisor?” Hell yeah I want to speak to a supervisor! Maybe this person can help me get the drive quicker. Of course, he doesn’t commit to shipping quicker, but promises he will do his best. At least this time I was given an issue tracking number so I can see what’s happening with this.

So, to sum it all up, my Dell laptop is great, but Dell Tech Support is NOT.

The fourth word in the title for this post should be “WinBlows”, but since I want people to see this post I decided to spell it the old fashioned way in the title. I was reluctant to start using Winblows Vista because of all the bad things I heard about it. But, when I bought my new computer it was preinstalled so I though I would give it try.

It’s a joke.

Less then 7 hours into using the computer I got the dreaded blue screen of death. Now today every time I type anything with the letter “P” in it the thing flips back to the login screen. Then if I hit the letter “U” it brings up an accessibility screen, and since my password has a “u” in it I can’t log back in. So then I have to reboot the machine. I am so frustrated with Vista right now that I am actually typing this post on a Macintosh computer, where there are no blue screens and I have almost never had it crash. If it weren’t for two programs that I need to use that are only available for Winblows, that laptop would get Linux installed on it.

Today I finally got around to uploading my first custom theme, the City of Minneapolis. This one features a nice view of the downtown skyline and allows you to modify some settings in the header and footer, including hiding my author credit without editing any theme files. Please see the official theme page for more information about this theme.

This theme is the first in what I hope to be many designed around a specific city. The colors in this theme were chosen to blend well with the photo in the header and not based on any official colors of the city. If you are interested in a theme for your favorite city, please feel free to contact me and I will see if I can build a theme around it for you.

It’s been a long time coming, but today we saw the release of the latest version of Wordpress, and so far I am impressed. This particular site is now using this latest version and aside form a couple of bugs I found it seems to work well. Hopefully the bugs can be worked out and a maintenance release will be available, but I want to focus on the new features with this post.

Theme Installer

For quite a while now Wordpress has had a wonderful tool for finding and installing plugins in Wordpress, but themes was a different story. Though the Wordpress.org web site listed hundreds of great themes, the only way to get them to work for your site was to download a zip file then upload the files to your web server. If you didn’t know how to use FTP or open a zip file, you could really be lost with this. I have seen quite a few sites running Wordpress that are using the classic them included with the Wordpress software.

This changes with Wordpress 2.8 with the addition of the “Add New Themes” tool that is built into the software. When you click on the option, you get a screen similar to the one on the right (click to enlarge) where you can search for themes with specific keywords, or select from a variety of options (tags) to find a theme. With the hundreds of themes already available you are certain to find one you can use.

When you search for a keyword, or by tag, or use either the “Featured” or “Newest” options on the “Add New Themes” page you will be presented with a list of themes to choose from. You can preview the themes before you install them, but be warned that the preview will have the sample data similar to what you see on the Wordpress.org web site. To see how it will look with your data, you will need to install the theme first. Don’t worry, just installing won’t change your site, you still need to activate it.

Once you find one you want to try, click on the install link to install the theme. The pop up window that shows up is a bit confusing at first as you have to scroll the window down to find the button to install the theme. Once you do this the system will download and install the theme for you, then you can preview it with your content or activate the theme on your site. If you don’t like the look of the theme once it’s installed, you can easily delete the theme from the Appearance page.

This feature will really make it easier for people to apply different themes to their site. The fine people at Wordpress even included a link to upload themes on this new section so that theme developers can easily share their themes from inside their own site.

There are quite a few other great new features that I want to talk about, but we’ll wait for tomorrow to post those. Let me get a chance to check them out before I tell you all about them. If you want more information on all the wonderful new features of Wordpress 2.8, you can check the official announcement or the codex page.

When you work in web development for over 20 years like I have, everyone you know asks you questions about their web site. Recently I have had quite a few people ask me if they can use Wordpress to build a web site for their business, even if they do not want to have a blog. Although the Wordpress software is primarily used to build blogs, it has a wonderful feature that make it perfect for static type web sites as well.

The feature we will be working with is available after you have created at least one page in your Wordpress site. Wordpress has the ability to create both posts and pages, and you will create a page by clicking on the “Add New” link under the “Pages” sub menu. By default, Wordpress creates a generic “about” page so you will likely already have one created, however, for this to work you need to create a page that will contain the content of your home page. It’s probably best to call this page “Home”, but you may prefer to name it differently. You can put some basic content there for now and change it after things are set up, but make sure you publish this page so it can be displayed.

Now that you have the page created, you will need to tell Wordpress to use this new page for your “home” page. This is done on the Reading Settings page. You can access this page within your site administration area by opening the Settings sub-menu and click the “Reading” option. A page similar to the screen capture to the right (click to enlarge) will appear. The option you will change is the “Front Page Displays” option. First, click the “A static page (select below)” option, then use the drop down next to “Front Page” to select the page you want to be your home page. Save this setting and your site will now display the selected page for your home page.

Now I know you are going to ask me about the other option on that screen. If you have no intention of writing a blog, just don’t select anything there, it can be left as is. However, if you plan to have a static home page but also a blog page, you can use this option to select which page will show your blog posts. You will need to have created a page in Wordpress for this purpose. You do not have to write any content on the page you create since Wordpress will replace it with your blog posts. Create an empty page with whatever name, probably “Blog”, and publish it, then return to the Reading Settings page and select that page for the blog posts.

As you can see, though Wordpress wasn’t specifically designed for it, a person could use WordPress for a static type web site. In fact, I have done it several times. Here are some examples:

• Whole Food Nation
• 77 Ingredients
• Interest Blogs

You are probably getting tired of me starting over with this blog, but I still have no idea what exactly I plan to do with this site. A career change this week means I have even less time to do anything, and the development I have been doing on WordPress themes and plugins will likely come to a halt. It’s too bad too, because I had some cool stuff in the works.

So, what will I use this blog for then? Well, like I said above I have no idea, but some time in the next few weeks (or months) and start to actually use this blog. The real reason for starting over was because the previous version of this site used WordPress MU and with the recent release of WordPress 2.8 I wanted to try it out. So, the old site is gone and the new site is going together. I will use someone else’s theme for a while until I figure out what I want to do and make my own theme.

For now, enjoy – but don’t expect daily or even weekly updates; I just don’t have the time right now.