Discussion of the situation spun up on Web Hosting Talk where it was determined that Blogetrey had been accused of hosting inappropriate content before. That probably meant they were hosting torrents or other illegal but not shut-down worthy. Copyright infringement. The site owner claimed that every copyright violation was removed within 24 hours. By the way, if you ever get slapped with a DMCA notice (i.e. a notice that your site has content copyritten to someone else), in order to be safe from a law suit, all you have to do is remove it. Done.

So what on earth would cause BurstNET, their host, to shut down the site without warning or notice? That’s right, he had to ask ‘What happened to my site?’ and was told it was shut down, terminated, and here’s his money back.

Turns out he had a link.

From BurstNET’s statement:

“It was revealed that a link to terrorist material, including bomb-making instructions and an al-Qaeda “hit list”, had been posted to the site. “

That’s it. A link. One link. But it was enough for a warrant which then showed this:

“Upon review, BurstNET® determined that the posted material, in addition to potentially inciting dangerous activities, specifically violated the BurstNET® Acceptable Use Policy. This policy strictly prohibits the posting of “terrorist propaganda, racist material, or bomb/weapon instructions”. Due to this violation and the fact that the site had a history of previous abuse, BurstNET® elected to immediately disable the system.”

Now the previous ‘abuse’ was copyvio, which was all handled legally, but clearly BurstNET was feeling the pinch. They probably got slapped with a wwarrent and did the legal thing: They shut it down.

Reagrdless of if it was fair or not to the other 69,999 sites hosted by Blogetery, it brings up the inherent problems of running an unchecked MultiSite. Anyone can make a blog/site, anyone can update it, and anyone can get you in trouble.

It’s been a few weeks, but finally news is coming out about the whole story. CNET’s article was invectively titled Bomb-making tips, hit list behind Blogetery closure. That said, it explained this in more detail which let everyone get a grip on what was actually going on.

I’m not going to get into the ethics of free speech and how it does (and doesn’t) apply to your website. Instead I want to use this as a reminder of the trouble you can get into, hosting websites. I host four, three are ‘mine’ and one is a site I like and visit pretty often. I’m very much aware of what’s going on all these sites and I monitor them frequently. This is not just to my benefit, but to everyone else’s on my servers. My host would be 100% within their rights to say “Ipstenu’s got a site that has kiddie porn! Kill her account!” and that would shut down everyone on my server.

As I mentioned before, WordPress MultiSite makes it a lot easier for someone to host a thousand blogs, unchecked, but that also means it’s a lot easier for someone to post questionable content. For copyvio cases, you’re covered when you remove the material in question, but for porn and terrorism, it’s not actually under the same purview. Again. I’m NOT going to get into the why of this, nor the right or wrong about it. If you have a website, you have to accept that your host really has no interest in being involved with a legal dispute regarding kiddie porn or terrorism.

This means it’s down to you to constantly and consistantly monitor your site for sub-sites and domains that are questionable. For me, if a site I host gets one Cease and Desist about copyvio, I take down the material, explain to the person who runs the site why, and ask them not to do it again. At this point, it’s their job to monitor their site. Should they fail to do so a second time, I give them a final warning of ‘If you can’t keep tabs on your site and your visitors, you can’t stay here.’ Third time and I close their account, refund them what’s left on their time, and offer to give them a copy of their site and database, intact.

For the rest, though, it’s a no-warning termination, specifically because porn and terrorism are hot button topics. I’m within my rights to do so (I own the server, I make the rules) and I owe it to the other people. My ISP is in their rights to do similar, because they own the … land my server is on. If that makes sense.

If all this sounds like too much work for you, then you shouldn’t be running an open, anyone-can-register-and-blog, multisite. Or you should hire some staff. Multisite is not a quick money scheme, it’s a job, and you have to take it seriously.

This is not endemic solely of WordPress, but with the advent of MultiSite becoming mainstream, it’s something that’s going to start coming up more and more. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

No, really. As far as the basic ‘This is a blog’ software goes, I was able to make a new WordPress site, find a design I liked, spin a child-theme to tweak a couple things, teach someone how to upload images, and basically filled out Artistic Showcase in all of five hours. That’s five. Like ‘I have five fingers.’

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some ‘things’ I’d like to see from the Automattic kids. Like what about those ‘other’ products getting priority?

Automattic ‘owns’, in so far as anyone can own Open Source products, the official WordPress suite. WordPress, BuddyPress, bbPress, GlotPress … Those guys. And WordPress is the grand poobah of them all.

What I love about WordPress is it’s extendibility. Everything I want to do, while it may not be built into WordPress, can (generally) find or write a plugin to do it. That new site I made isn’t running a single plugin to do what it does, however. Everything in Artistic Showcase is bog-standard WordPress. Oh, the domain has some tweaks, but that site doesn’t have a single extra plugin. Isn’t that cool? That’s what I mean when I say WordPress is complete for me.

But then I look at JFO and there’s a hell of a lot more going on. 33 plugins, a ton of .htaccess tweaks, some server hacks and a whole lot more. Which isn’t to say there’s something lacking from the other site, but it’s a whole question of ‘What is my site’s goal.’ For the Showcase, I just wanted a simple photoblog sort of gallery, where we could type up explanations of the gallery, upload the pictures, and have it look really pretty. The design I picked, not my own, was both rustic and similar to our other, somewhat related, site about the SCA (Meals on Camels).

And in many respects, there are ‘things’ that need ‘fixing’, but they’re not inherently WordPress. It’s the other Automattic products that need some fire under them. The problem is that WordPress is so big and so known and so used that it takes priority to just about every other product right now, or so it seems. That’s not a bad thing, mind you, but it causes problems.

All of the WordPress sites use bbPress for the forums. bbPress, while I love it, is sort of the red-headed step-child of the lot. It’s fallen aside, it’ll likely become a plugin instead of a stand-alone app, and the best I can say about it is that it’s usable. This means the forums for WordPress.org are usable, and they have great RSS feeds. They’re easy for me to read, but they can be difficult to follow. They really just need a bit of organizational cleanup.

Before you read much into that, I should point out that I’ve used at least a dozen forum softwares over the last 15 years. In order of how I picked them up, I think it was YABB, YABBSE, phpBB, SimpleMachines, Invision PowerBoard, bbpress to name the ones I remember best. There was one before YABB, and a few that I didn’t host on my own server, and some I made for other people, and some I tried and wanted to burn with fire. And of them all? I cannot, in good conscience, recommend any of them. They all have massive issues, they all have massive problems, and they all annoy me.

There is no forum software I look at, like I do WordPress, and go ‘Yes, daddy, buy me that one.’

Sad, isn’t it? It’s the inherent problem of forum software, I think. The concept is not flawed. Anyone can make a post, anyone can reply, anyone can converse. But somehow in the execution, there end up being bells and whistles and extras and methods that just stop working. You want to track read and un-read posts, you want alerts to specific posts you ‘follow’, you want to mark everything as read. And every forum has it’s own way of doing that.

I will say, the BuddyPress forums annoy me right now because their RSS feeds per topic are broken, and the ‘washed out’ colors are too pale. They need darker text and link colors. But the rest of my issues with their forums are just that … they’re forums. And I have issues with forums.

Speaking of BuddyPress… It’s the baby of the WordPress related sites! Okay, maybe bbPress is the baby, but BuddyPress was adopted. If you know Ning, then BuddyPress is pretty much like that, but as an add on to WordPress, which makes it really cool, in my mind. But BuddyPress is growing and having the requisite growth issues. Right now they need more people helping out, and people worry that what’s happening to bbPress (a slow, agonizing death) will happen to BuddyPress.

bbPress’ peculiar fate is far more complicated. See, one day the WordPress people decided they needed a forum for wordpress.org and they whipped up bbPress. Then a few lonely developers ended up ‘in charge’ of it, in the wild, and they carried on. As far as WordPress was concerned, the forums did what ‘they’ wanted, they were happy. But Open Source is what it is, and things grew and changed and developed. Then the most well known of those devs got pulled into the WordPress fold and suddenly … bbPress looked abandoned. Abruptly, Matt Mullenweg, the ‘main man’ behind WordPress and it’s parent company, Automattic (get it?) said ‘Ah! You are not lost! We’re coming back!’ And that was a year or so ago and there wasn’t a whole lot of traction.

On the other side is BuddyPress, which was a plugin some people developed that was then picked up by Automattic (who ‘owns’ all these things) in 2008. Now the main brains behind BuddyPress are working a lot on WordPress, with less time for BuddyPress, and people are afraid that BuddyPress will be dropped.

Everyone needs to chill out and breath. They seem to think that because Automattic is a company, that is should run like the Fortune 500, monolithic companies. Or maybe, because it’s hip and cool, it should run like Google. Automattic is neither. It’s Open Source development and Open Source work. That means it’s kind of like getting a bunch of cats in a room and giving them toys and leaving. You come in once in a while to feed them and scoop the litter, but mostly they’ll get things done as they do.

The traditional business model isn’t going to work for them. They don’t all sit in an office, most of the people who help out (like me) don’t get paid a red cent. That doesn’t mean I don’t think a dose of corporate America might not be a bad idea (nail things down a little, organize a little, tighten a little), but it means I think all that should be implemented carefully. Automattic works best the way it is because of freedom. At the same time, projects other than WordPress work less well because of the freedom to roll between projects. WordPress takes more work, but BuddyPress and bbPress need more work.

For me, today, everything works well. There are a few annoyances (like user management) but most everything I want can be done easily enough, and I’m happy. I can see that Automattic needs to change a little, adapt to be able to support WordPress as well as the children projects, but they’re growing, they’re learning, and with Ning charging people, I suspect BuddyPress will be picking up even more steam soon.

Now if they’d only fix the damn forums.

So I went to http://twitter.com/cnnbrk/statuses/17356428197 and …

Nicely done. This is why you have to watch out with URL shorteners, folks.

Here’s what happened.

Friday April 9th I was surfing the net while working from home, using my non-virus protected Windows PC. Yeah, I know. While visiting a friend’s site, I got a weird pop-up saying ‘Such and such.com says your PC is infected!’ I told my friend, assumed nothing untoward happened, and went on my day, which included some FTPing to my domain.

Of note, I ALWAYS use SSH and SFTP. The first S stands for Secure. Of course, it’s not actually all that secure. I mean, they’re better than Telnet and FTP, but they won’t protect you from everything.

On Monday the 12th, I post a new blog post here and things go pear shaped. Cache is weird, people are getting errors, I can’t sort it out. I thought it was WP-Super-Cache, but then it wasn’t. It was insane.

On Tuesday the 13th, emails from my office to my home were bouncing. I thought it was my mailserver blocking my office!

Finally, Sunday the 18th, Taffy bitches “I can’t mail your father!” Now I get hands in and look. What do I see? “Connections not accepted from IP addresses on Spamhaus XBL.” And it’s listing MY IP ADDRESS!

Thank goodness, LiquidWeb was able to find the vector point of infection, which once they gave me the details, I knew it had to go back to that Friday. And they got me off the black lists pretty fast so everything’s okay now. But let this be a lesson, everyone! You’re only as safe as you keep yourself!

Next week, though, I start biking to work again.

So yeah, there’s that. More later.

But right now, and every time I need to update it, I hate it.

I don’t mind using command line to wget the latest version and unzip it, overlaying the new files atop the old ones. What I mind is having to manually visit the pages for all my extensions, and determine if I need to upgrade or not. It makes me wish for WordPress with the happy ‘Hey, that plugin needs updating!’

See, there’s no admin ‘side’ to MediaWiki, like there is for WordPress, or ZenGallery, or anything else I run on my sites. MediaWiki is for the hardcore people who don’t mind getting their hands dirty. And as a user, I think this is the real problem with the whole thing. Until they make a user friendly admin side of the whole thing, MediaWiki will remain used by the nerdy, the geeky and the techie, rather than the whole world. Part of why WordPress became so popular is they made it not easy, but easier to run your own blog. It’s still got problems, sure, but they made it so you could easily learn how to manage your own site.

And then there’s MediaWiki.

MediaWiki sucks to admin. Like today I found out I could turn on File Caching. That’s great new, I think! I use it for my gallery and my blogs (runs faster among other things). Except that, unlike WordPress (where Donncha’s freakin’ amazing WP Super Cache can clear out files on a scheduled basis) or ZenPhoto (where it runs once a day, or whenever I press ‘clear!’), MediaWiki has no cache expiry. That blew my mind, but seeing as MediaWikis are ‘mostly’ static content, it makes a little sense.

So I turned it on and ran $php maintenance/rebuildFileCache.php which force caches everything. All at once. This is awesome to get your site ‘started’ and all told, it took up about a moderate, but not huge, bit of space.

Also, I was told ‘When you edit a page, the cache is refreshed’ except I did, and it didn’t. Then I was told ‘Add this to your page URL and it will prompt you to recache.’ (this being ?action=purge) except that didn’t either. If I was logged in, it did nothing. If I was logged out, it did, but then I went back and it was still the old page. Finally I sorted out that the cache pages had to be owned by ‘nobody:nobody’ (this isn’t too weird, BTW). The problem NOW is that if they were owned by that, then the script rebuildFileCache.php didn’t work!

So, great, it now works, it now flushs when I edit and save a page. If I run the rebuild command, I’ll have to manually go in and chown the files to nobody, which annoys me, but I have godlike access to the server and I can always fix it. But what if I want to delete everything in the cache? Basically I have to dump the entire folder. Which is annoying, but at least it’s working now.

Why would I have to flush the whole cache? Because I make a formatting change, let’s say. Also, I have advertising on my sites. How does this get affected?

In the end, I’m going to keep the cache running for a month, see how it goes. But it still annoys me how much of this is lacking because of no admin ‘dashboard.’

Then again, that’s MediaWiki. Function over form. All powerful, all annoying.

ClamAV is an tool that you put on your server and it detects malicious software. In short, it’s a server virus scanner and most servers use it to scan email for viruses. Now those of you who use stuff like McAffee and Norton and other virus scanners for your email, you may not know that servers also scan for that stuff as well, and try to kill the emails before they ever get to you! Yeah, think about how many emails with viruses you get. Personally, I’ve never had a problem with viruses and not because I use a mac. It’s because I pay attention to the content and context of an email before I open any attachments.

But this is about ClamAV and server-side scanners.

The story starts with my twice a week check of my server. I like to keep tabs on what it’s doing, how it’s doing, what’s going on, etc etc. I was a little surprised to see my server load spiked. Server load is sort of how you know how hard your server is working. A high load means its looking at a lot of work. A low load is ‘better’ but you have to admit that you’re going to have SOME load, so you may as well figure out what’s a good load for you. I’ve had problems with WordPress and right now I’m using WP Super Cache (See “I take it back. WP-Super-Cache is a Super Hero” from September 2009).

The point is, I know that a spike like this is okay:

That spike there was when I ran a small upgrade. You’ll notice how after the moment, it drops back down and has a happy nice day? That’s how things are supposed to work. A spike with traffic and then everything’s happy again. Great.

So what does this mean?

Yeah, I took a look at that, paled, and asked myself ‘What in the four hells is going on!?’ I did the logical thing and looked at the date and time. Noon on Monday I’d made a change to the firewall, moving from the perfectly acceptable, though harder to manage (no GUI), APF Firewall to CSF. That move was a TEENY bit on the spur of the moment, as I wasn’t having any problems with APF per se, but I was being hit up by a lot of spammers and my usual attacks of http:BL and Bad Behavior weren’t cutting it. They’re front end fixes to the ongoing spam problem, alas. I hate spammers.

Worried that my new firewall was ‘bad’, I started to Google if CSF caused high server loads. And found nothing. So I went back to the beginning and checked top. Top is a unix command that you use to see what’s using up resources on your server. It’s like Task Manager for Windows, but it’s a lot more informative. Top lets you see details and sort and basically when you want to find out what ran off with the spoon and killed your server, baby, I’m the bottom and log on to top. Top showed me, interestingly enough, that ClamD was using between 70 and 90% of my resources. On a slow week, like the net generally has for entertainment sites between Christmas and New Years, that’s not really a problem. There’s not a lot going on with the sites I host right now, the extra CPU usage wasn’t a problem. Come back on January 20th, though, now that’s a problem.

But the thing of it is, back in September, I optimized my server and I remember reading on multiple places that ClamAV and ClamD use up a lot of resources and people turn them off. So I did.

Isn’t that much nicer?

The real question, at the end of the day, is if having ClamAV turned off causes more problems than having it on? So far, no one’s breached my servers, though that’s a function of my firewalls, and SpamAssassin seems to be taking care of the spam emails, which is where most viruses come from in my experience, unless the server’s hacked, at which point I’m kind of screwed anyway. But what I find myself wondering now is if it’s dangerous to not be using ClamAV or what. And I don’t have an answer to that yet.

Yesterday I had to cycle the HTTP service three times to clear things up. The first time, someone was using a really old URL (for a part of the site gone 2 years now) and, when it didn’t give them what they wanted, they kept hitting it. I blocked the IP address and we were fine. But. Then the news that I had some new, cool, information hit, and suddenly I was spiking like mad. I checked my stats, trying to see what was the culprit. The gallery is pretty tolerant of these things (though I have turned on the Static HTML cache right now) and while I did have some hefty images (1 to 2 MB, I usually try to keep ‘em to .75 megs), it wasn’t ZenPhoto borking.

No, my poor, poor WordPress was having a heart attack because I’d gotten myself crosslinked from a couple high traffic sites. How bad? Well that spike on the graph below may explain it.

The first thing I did was tune the server. Actually, I’d done that months ago, dropping my memory usage from 77% to about 60%, but now I went in to see how well that was working. There was a little more I could do, so I optimized a couple more settings and things eased up a little. Not enough. I scrubbed the CPU usage, too, and normally we never spiked over 1 for a load average, but that wasn’t working yesterday. Sidebar. CPU Load is a very bizarre thing to most newbie server admins, and I’m not great at sorting it out myself. Of course, I know that a ‘good’ load is anything around .3 and a ‘bad’ load is something like, oh, 9. And yes, I hit 9 yesterday on my 8 processor VPS box. I’m not going to explain it here, as I’m still learning and I’m sure I’d get it wrong, but the gist is that you don’t really worry if your load hops up to 1 or 2 for a short amount of time. When it stays there and is spiking at 4 or 5, however, you need to pay attention.

What kept happening to me was that it would spike up to a load between 5 and 9, and the HTTP service (the bit that serves up webpages) would scream and fall over. Email, FTP, shell access and the rest were all okay, though, so I knew the server itself was fine. Thus I deduced something was sucking up the load and I knew I had three choices: JFO’s blog (it’d happened before), JFO’s gallery, or YTDaW. While I host YTDaW, I don’t actively admin it in any authoritative stance. The only ‘mod’ work I’ve done is turn off email alerts for people who are using non-existent emails (and then, only when I’m tired of getting their bouncing email). Devon pretty much keeps me on tap for server admin and security stuff, and I do my utmost best to keep my hands OUT of the pie. It’s her baby, I’m just the tech.

And while they’re using a pretty old version of the forum software, it’s secure enough and solid enough that I didn’t think they were the culprit. The evidence (heh) supported that theory, so I went to look at JFO. It was definitely my old girl, and right away I could see that we were getting a lot of traffic from new users. Four times the traffic. Before you could say ZOMG! I was on Google Analytic and Woopra, checking out who the hell was hitting my site and the answer was surprising.

Everyone. (Well, mostly FaceBook, AfterEllen and Twitter, but really, it was all over.)

I’d accidentally broken news about three hot topics within a couple hours, and now everyone and their mother wanted to see JFO and, as many people have mentioned, WordPress was hemorrhaging under the ‘digg’ effect. Basically it was trying to serve up dynamic (generated on the fly) pages to too many people at once. If I was using static HTML, it would go faster, but WordPress doesn’t do that. Except … except it does if you use WP Super Cache.

As I mentioned before, I don’t (didn’t!) like that plugin. I want my app to behave correctly without it. I mean, the PM of Britain uses WordPress! I was sure they don’t need caching. They probably have a rack of servers on a co-located cluster. Except I viewed source and they were using it. The Library of Congress wasn’t, though, and neither were The Speaker of the House (Nancy Pelosi) or the Army. Honestly, I wasn’t sure how to take that, but after four hours of babysitting my server, I took a plunge and installed WP Super Cache for the fourth time.

The first few times sucked, I admit. It was a lot of massaging and manual crap that, while I’m perfectly capable of doing, I didn’t like. This was easier. A chmod, an install, a click, another chmod and then I was done. And guess what? My loads dropped from an average of 3.45 to one of .35 by morning. On top of that, my memory had one spike since I turned it on, and that was right when I was running backups and the like.

So I’m keeping it on for now, especially with what I expect tonight, but I think that I can say … yeah. WP-Super-Cache does what it says.

Back in the days of IE 4 (yeah, 4, so 1997), Microsoft hit upon a great idea. If you made a teeny picture and saved the file as favicon.ico in your html root, their browser would pick it up and be the icon on your bookmarks menu. It didn’t take long for people to figure out microsoft.com was doing this, and they began implementing it all over for every site they could. As people got smarter, they figured out how to fake it, so you could have a different favicon for every page, just by manipulating the head of your html document.

Back in the day, you had to use .ico (Microsoft Icon) files as your favicon, but these days most modern browsers pick up .png, .gif and .jpg happily enough. This allows people to make animated favicons, which need to be shot and killed. For maximum compatibility, though, most people still use .ico, since IE doesn’t like the others. Or it didn’t. Someone on IE 8 will have to check.

The real problem boils down to size, for most people. At 16x16px, you don’t have a lot of room. This site actually has a non-recognizable icon (it’s the Xena/Gabby picture). Technically you can go up to 32×32 for an image, and I have one that’s 240×240, but in the end, they all render at 16×16 on 99.999% of browsers, so looking good at that size is your goal.

If you think I’m being silly, about a year ago, Google changed their favicon and admitted that it wasn’t final. Right away they basically started open submissions for a better one. When they changed it in January, it became the favicon heard ’round the world. Eventually, Google stepped up to explain the change. It’s important to have an icon that matches your site, as Google explains, as well as a unified look for all aspects of your design. Should you have a different look for each app on your site, or an all in one? How does it affect the other aspects of your site, like the iPhone’s new icons for saved webpages?

These aren’t simple answers, but to explain how I go about it, here are some favicons that I have made and use out there in the world. Not this site’s though. I need to come up with something better for it.

When I moved JFO from orange to green a year or so ago, I made a new favicon to reflect the design. The image is a cropped shot from the original header (which is now a full color photo, but still), and is a close up of Jorja’s face. It’s JUST recognizable as Jorja, I think.

Alternately, I came up with this image, which is a copy of the shot used on the header currently, done in greens to match the site. In a way, it’s both more and less recognizable, as the image is harder to make out (it’s a head and shoulders) but as it’s the same used in the header, people might make the connection. I’ve yet to use this on a live site, but it shows up on my test sites right now.

For the website ‘SCA Jews’, I had gone with a slightly eastern feel of a website, that evoked both the idea of camping with the concept of days gone by. Evening Sun came from spectacu.la, and took minimal editing to fit my plan. The problem was I had no favicon. Originally I put a little sun up there, but then it struck me that the ‘meaning’ of the site was to promote the meal plan “Meals on Camels”. What better way to express this than with … a camel.

I also helped design (or rather optimize the design for) my friend’s site, The Yeast I Could Do. She had no favicon and I spent a couple hours scrounging for something bread-ish, and eventually picked this one, even though it’s questionable. It does look a bit like a loaf of bread, and she recognized it, so I think it went okay. In it’s .ico format, it has a transparent background.

Finally there’s this one. Pony Wars is a joke site I made up with a friend for a “My Little/Pretty Pony RPG”. I mocked up the site because I was bored one day and finding an icon for it has been a bear. In the end, I went with this 33×33 (yes I know) icon of a pink pony. It doesn’t scale very well and looks weird on the site itself, but it’s a hard icon to shrink.

If, in the end, you’re stumped at making one, there are a lot of favicon collections out there to help you. Be warned, they can take a LONG time to load:

• favicoop, a favicon collection with over 43288 icons
• MpP’s Gallery, broken up into multiple pages
• Favourite Favicons, not as many, but easier to see

What are your favorite favicons?

For a while now, I’ve been running JFO on Justin Tadlock’s Hybrid News Theme. My site is green instead of blue, and I’ve hacked around a lot to make it flow like I wanted, but the basic work wasn’t mine. Just the customization. This site uses Vladimir Prelovac’s Blue Grace theme, only slightly hacked about to show ads where I want them. The real hack is the ‘Baking Grace’ theme I made for my friend’s new site. Instead of two sidebars on the right, I gave her the Holy Grail and made it center column. She was one of the easiest ‘clients’ I’ve ever had, since she used to work in layout and design. Unlike a lot of people, she knew what she wanted, and just had to be coached through terminology that had changed since she last coded websites. But then again, she had me.

Actually, Blue Grace and Hybrid News are both what you call ‘Child Themes’. That is, they ONLY customize the parts of a parent theme that I want them to. This means that Justin and Vladimir really did do the totally hard stuff, sorting out functions and code and what not, and I was free to do what I do best: HTML and CSS.

The trick to finding a theme is narrowing down what you need and what you want. When you get started, you see everything and think that you want to be everything right away, all at once and have it all. It’s not a modern problem, nor is it a product of the me-generation. Everyone’s always wanted success, and having a successful website, like the next YouTube or what have you, is the dream a lot of us have. So you look at those sites and think ‘What would Amazon do?’ (as one of my fav web gurus used to say). Of course, if you play on Twitter these days, you’ve heard about Amazon’s recent failure (removing gay books from searches for being ‘adult’ books, when clearly not all were). Some people moved on to ‘What would Google do?’ and, for the most part, both those questions are valid.

Here’s the secret. Keep it simple, stupid!

All you need to get started it to decide your basic layout. Header, content, sidebar(s) and footer are a requirement, so figure out what layout you like. Three columns with content in the center (Amazon), content left (Webmonkey) or content right (like WikiPedia) are the basic mainstays these days, and I suggest them if only because they’re easy to tweak later. I consider a header and footer requirements. Have your site logo/name in the header and contact links and credits in the footer. Pick a color scheme you like that, preferably, ‘goes with’ your content. Blogging about bread? Go for brown. Blogging about the environment? Spring colors. I happen to just like blue alot.

After that, it’s all up to your favorites. Post layout, if you’re blogging, is something you have to judge on a case by case basis. Some people like to have big images, others thumbnails. Some people like to have the front page show full posts, others excepts. Details like that come with growth. Often it’s four or ten posts in that you realize, you know, THAT didn’t work. But all of that is commentary. The basics of site layout, the master layout, and colors are what you need to get started.

As for getting people to your site? Just keep blogging. Hook up your blog to Twitter and FaceBook and LiveJournal. Tell your friends. Don’t be discouraged at 100ish visitors at first. Heck 100 individual visitors is fantastic! 17 is pretty cool too. Don’t bother with those ‘we advertise your blog!’ sites, and instead jump right into the ones about what you’re about! Fansites talk to fansites, etc. Put links in your sigs on forums and just spread the word. It’ll take a while, maybe a year, but the cascade from ‘a site’ to ‘a site that is noticed’ is mind boggling sometimes.

Keep plugging away!