Speaking of updates, have shelved my education in Ruby on Rails for now. I have stepped back and decided to learn PHP so I can then move on to working with Drupal and Joomla, and hopefully making modules. Now you might say, “Why keep the www.coreyonrails.com name then?”, and to reply, I would simply say, “Because I paid for the domain.”. I have no reason to let the domain go, they’re cheap enuff to keep around in the event I want to use it. I do own several other domain names as well. People always think they have a domain someone might want to buy from them for millions later on, I am no different. I know it’ll never happen, but I liked the ones I bought, and maybe one day I’ll use them.

Well I am off for now, head on over to www.coreytess.net to check out some awesome photos from my RC racing, and whatever else I am up to.

The themes that seem to be more up to date are the eBusiness, ePhoto, eVid, eGamer, and Coldstone themes. They are the nicest looking, in my opinion. The other themes look just as nice, but I haven’t worked with most of them, and a couple I tried look like they are waiting to be updated to 2.8, or my local test environment is broken, could be either really.

The themes all have a read me on how to install them, and any required plugins, and Photoshop files to work with if you choose to customize anything. The site also has a large forum for everything from questions, to suggestions, and a place to show off any customizations to the themes.

Once you get the theme installed you’ll want to go and take a look at the options for the theme. Currently they are working on making their options piece for the themes easier to use, and nicer looking.

Here you can see the options for the eBusiness theme, they look nice, and are pretty straightforward in what they do.

Most of the theme is controlled through the options, some of what you can put on your homepage, or use for thumbnails is done through the use of custom fields, a common thread amongst themes like these, and the rest is setting the links and some teaser type text. The on thing I can say here is the use of IDs for things on the homepage, specifically with eBusiness theme, and a couple others. I don’t use the querystring param setup for my permalinks, it hurts SEO (yes even on a tiny site I think about SEO). I use permalinks formatted with the month/day/year/title, or something along those lines. I don’t like having to dig to find the ID of something to have it on the homepage. I guess either Wordpress could make these IDs more readily available, which may already be possible but I am not seeing it. It would be better if the theme could pick the ID, or maybe have something to browse the content you already have in the site, and it can pull the ID itself.

Once those items are setup, the last thing left to do really is replace the stock logo with your own. This was one other point I was kind of disappointed in. Throughout the theme you can set the URL for an image for the “About Me” section, or for many other items like ads. However with the logo, the only thing I can find is to change the name of the file in the header file, or to name your custom logo the same as the stock one. It would have been nice to have an option for this in the theme. Again, this is a tiny thing, and anyone who knows Wordpress should be able to manage this on their own.

All in all, these themes are fantastic, you get a lot for a tiny price tag really. I highly suggest taking a look at the site, see if there is something you like for your own site, and take the plunge. The forums are active with the admins, so help is always easily found, and they are beautiful themes, with the most important part, the right price.

I had spent a lot of time looking at other “premium” themes, and theme clubs. What I found was a lot of generic layouts, or worse the same layout repeated with slightly different colors or fonts. Most of these themes alone, cost more than the price of the many options you get with Elegant Themes. Hop on over and take a look, and check my other site where I’ll be using on of their themes soon. Now I just have to make up my mind.

Dreamhost has a lot of stuff built into their web panel that just makes life easier, and they allow me to manage my domains, ASO does not. The domain thing was huge, it allowed me to setup Google Apps for the new domain in a flash. It’s all little stuff I guess, when you’re talking about little sites it all is little really, but it is nice nonetheless.

So either way, the new site can be seen here, coreytess.net. Let me know what you think, either here or there.

I’m working slowly, I managed to pick up a new hobby over the summer, Remote Control Cars/Trucks, and it has been consuming a lot of time, and to my girlfriend’s dismay, money. Great hobby but it can turn into a money pit when you start racing like I have. I’m sure I can make a whole post on the racing and what I’ve learned and done and so on, maybe I will tomorrow. Anyways, once the weather turns to the cold stuff we enjoy so much up here in New England, I’m planning on going full speed into the rails version of this site. I’ve dug myself a bit of a hole with it already using Wordpress for the interim, as I will now have to write some sort of import for the existing post and content on the site now. All in all it should be nice once done. I’m not sure about a design, but I am sure I’ll try and go simple and keep it along the lines of what is here now.

Work has been busy, I’ve been expanding my programming skills a great deal in the .Net world. I have made some amazing pieces of functionality for our customers. It might be my opinion but I have no shame in taking pride in the things I have made lately. I honestly was not aware of how much I knew and could get done at my previous job. I was not allowed time or opportunity to really program like I do now, and I am glad I made the change. You can take a look at the work we’ve been doing from our corporate site, Websolutions Technology Inc..

For anyone interested my girlfriend does have website finally, we got her setup on Dreamhost after a deal I could not resist. They offered $6.95 for a full year of unlimited hosting. So I set her up with a Wordpress blog like mine, and now she blogs about her quilting and crafting, and she links to her Etsy site where she sells what she makes. Feel free to take a look, http://lovejessicaalways.com.

Well off for now.

The CPU is an Intel Core i7 920. The speed is 2.67 GHz, which is slower than what it replaced, a 3.0 GHz P4, but in the long run there is no competition the i7 is a killer. The list of features is insane, level 3 cache, 4 real cores, unlike your Core 2 Quads and Core 2 Duos, etc… The 920 is the cheapest of the 3 CPUs out right now, and I can only imagine what the extreme is like if the low end is this great. 

The motherboard I used is an EVGA board, they only make 1 right now but here it is at Newegg, EVGA X58. I have always gone with Asus in the past, but this board said overclocking, and had better features, so I got it. I am impressed with what EVGA packages with the board. They give a nice big color diagram of the motherboard with everything explained, what connector is where, even the pin configurations. Even something small, like how the I/O plate for the case is padded on the back, instead of those razor like metal tabs on most plates, is appreciated. That padding did make getting the motherboard screwed into the case difficult, I had to really push it into place to get the screws in, but it’s worth it. They also included the usuall assortment of cables, 6 SATA, 1 round IDE, some molex to SATA power connectors, and two SLI connectors. One for just your “simple” SLI setup of two video cards, and a nice solid PCB with 6 connectors for a triple SLI. If only I had the income to support a triple SLI setup, and to be honest a need, which I still insist nobody truly has that need. The board is great, nice simple setup, bios is LOADED with options, and the appropriately named “E-LEET” utility makes overclocking and stat watching even easier. 

The hard drives are all Western Digital, one high speed 150GB VelociRaptor for the OS, and two Caviar 500GB drives for storage. I didn’t do RAID, I have my reasons and thats final. The drives are fast, but as stated above I need to figure out if I am truly abusing as they should be abused.

Lastly I got 6GB of DDR3 PC1600 RAM in a triple channel setup from OCZ. So far no complaints there, we’ll see how it goes with overclocking later on. 

I did not touch the video card yet, honestly I blew the money on the parts above mostly. So for now I am sticking with the gradually aging XFX GeForce 7900 GT. Soon to be replaced with an EVGA 9800 GTX+. Anyone interested in paying for somethign better, please email me. Just kidding ;)

So for now I would have to say the i7 is highly recommended, I know this wasn’t much of a review but this isn’t Toms Hardware. This whole upgrade is a massive leap in performance and technology from my P4 with 4GB of RAM and a single 250GB IDE hard drive running at a whopping 5400 RPM. 

Well off to bed for now, feel free to comment and give feedback, whoever is out there in the web world.