I recently setup a new blog for my girlfriend using Wordpress, on a different host than this one (great deal I couldn’t pass up). We were looking for themes for her quilting and crafting site, and found some pretty good blogs and resources beyond the typical one, the Wordpress theme directory.

First was a blog called ThemeGrrl, as the name and title suggests it is for more feminine themes, but since this was my girlfriend’s crafting site, that’s a good thing. She seems to have a lot of posts for different styles of themes, and is pretty well put together. She uses the same host as the new one I used for my girlfriend, and has posted about them a few times as well. 

Next was SimplyWP, the site is not too bad, they have some nice themes to look at, although I wish they would put a preview pic in the blog post itself. I’m a huge fan of free themes, it’s a great way for people with the skills to put together a small portfolio, even better if they get used. There is also really no need to pay for a lot for theme for your personal blog. I sometimes wonder how much business the “Premium” themes vendors get, if anyone of you is reading this, please feel free to give me a clue. I myself am completely incapable of designing anything, I just don’t have the creativity I guess, and I envy those who can. 

As always setting up the new site was a breeze, especially since most hosts have auto installers for Wordpress. I really like that I can crank out something simple and useable so fast, which still has the potential to become a decent site either with additional plugins, or by adding in another app to the host. If anyone needs some help with Wordpress I might be able to help, just ask away. If I don’t know the answer, I will gladly make up one that sounds good, just kidding.

So I haven’t been posting because work has been taking most of my time, and at the end of the day the last thing I want to do is type. For an Update, I am no longer Ektron Inc. I left Ektron back in November, and now I work for a new company called Websolutions Technology Inc. It’s a great company, small and close knit. I get to work from home, one of the best, and sometimes worst, things ever. It’s great for obvious reasons, the worst part is simply because of my internet connection up here in New Hampshire. It tends to drop off quite a bit, lately especially. That makes working from home difficult. But you find ways to make it work out in the end. Websolutions is an Elite Ektron Partner, so I get to work with the stuff I already know well. We have a lot of clients, big and small, and I get to work on all kinds of different projects. Sometimes it’s just updates to some static website, or adding new functionality to an existing site, but I also get to work on a site from “scratch”. It’s not truly from scratch as we have a great web designer who puts the layouts together, and then us developers come in and chop ‘em up. It’s nice to have different sites to work on and different features to write from week-to-week, or day-to-day depending on what is being done.

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So I just upgraded the home PC, I still prefer desktops to laptops, to a new Intel Core i7 setup. I also finally picked up some SATA drives instead of the antiquated IDEs, and a 6GB triple channel kit for RAM. So far I have to say this thing is a monster. It is fast, Vista 64-bit boots in 30 seconds give or take. I’m still working to figure out why my bios says my drives are IDE, but they are running fast so I am not complaining yet. I’ll run some tests later this week and see exactly how beefy this thing is. But I can tell you, as a geek who has built several computers, both my own and others, nothing is more satisfying that seeing 8 processors in task manager. Given 4 of those are virtual from our old friend hyper-threading, yes it’s back folks, but it’s sweet. 

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