Archive for the ‘WordPress’ Category

WordPress Template Search

Saturday, February 4th, 2012

WordPress Template Search

As if my life is not busy enough, I have decided that it is time for me to find a new Wodpress theme for my peaceengine.com blog. This post records that journey and the resulting decision.

Blog Theme Search

  • First I searched for sites that recomended companies providing various WordPress themes. I found themegrade.com especially helpful. Their page combines the ratings in the 3 categories and reveals the top 10 theme providers who develop elegant WordPress themes. Their #1 overall pick was ElegantThemes so, given their high rating in all categories, I decided to begin there. They were ranked #1 in Theme Graphic Design, #2 in Theme Functionality and Usability, and #3 in Theme Coding, which coincidentally matched the weight I assigned to the categories themselves.
  • I very much liked that ElegantThemes license is GPL for PHP, XHTML and JS files. I was troubled by the non-GPL license for CSS and theme images but figured I’d wait and see how that played out.
  • Elegantthemes $39 per year fee for unlimited download and use of all themes seemed reasonable and affordable.

ElegantThemes Evaluation

I decided to study the top few themes in order of their overall rankings and record my thoughts

  • Using the ThemeGrade rating list as a guide I explored ElegantThemes. For the most part the descriptive phrasing is straight from the ElegantThemes gallery comments.
  • InterPhase is a beautiful, clean design that maintains a “cutting edge” feel without loosing its sense of professionalism.
  • Evolution is ElegantThemes first fully responsive design. What makes the theme so special is its ability to adapt to various screen size. Shrinking the browser size during live preview demonstrates this ability.
  • Coldstone offers a unique blend of grungy and professional elements.

Greetings Fellow Bloggers

Thursday, January 13th, 2011

Greetings Fellow Bloggers,

This is a primary landing page for http://blog.peaceengine.com/‘s fellow bloggers. You are reading this page because I wrote it for you.

Most likely you are here because you followed a link placed in a comment on your blog. Please take note of the fact that I wrote a comment indicating I had a reading comprehension of what you had written about at your blog and had something sincere to say. Then I appended this URL so that you might have the opportunity to read an explanation about my process of blogging and decide whether our respective blogs are compatible enough that we might swap a few links.

If you happened upon this page by chance then please accept my thanks for sticking around to read these words. I have hand written a couple pages in my journal and have scanned them for your reading enjoyment. Their URL is near the bottom of this page.

Please have a look through the Categories in the right hand column and pick a category. If you like that category please feel free to use its URL in your blog, leave a comment. This comment is in “blogging” for example.

Please notice the Post Tags at the bottom of this post. They are another way of grouping pages together. I personally focus more on categories these days though I am warming to tags too.

I am hoping to become a good writer. Towards that end I hand write and draw in my journal which I call my Inventor’s Diary (Id™) which I publish under the Peace Engine License™.

This page is pure copyleft (see Free Software Foundation for definition of copyleft).
Wednesday, January 12, 2011, 7:00 PM, 10°F, Woodbury, Minnesota.

If you pay my blog a visit and are not a spammer trying to stuff marketing information into a comment, I’ll look at your name and if it is OK I may edit your comment and follow the link to your page. If all goes well I may let your comment into the blog by setting it to Approved.

If your page throws popup,, popunders, or any other such behavior, I will permanently delete your comment or I may edit it and remove the offending URL.

If I like your URL’s content I may add an “Ed:” not or I may simply approve the comment. I am happy for the search engines to find your site by following links from mine. This is mutually beneficial.

I am gaining an understanding of how the blogging and search engine game is played. Blogging can be about many things. For me it is about building goodwill and better friendships among humans of all nations of earth.

Writing by hand is what I do as a hobby. It passes the time and leaves a legacy for heirs and descendants. It helps establish a set of provenance within an artifact that may be sold at public auction.

I wonder what 96 page pairs of my handwriting would go for at public auction. You can read about these and other topics in my newest book. It is so new that I haven’t even figured out a title yet.

Oh well. Fortune awaits some future day. For today this small writing must suffice.

http://peaceengine.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/1619_161A_Greetings_Fellow_Bloggers.jpg

111E DNA + culture + full moon

Saturday, December 13th, 2008

digg: http://digg.com/design/DNA_Culture_Full_Moon

Saturday, December 13, 2008

111E DNA + Culture + Full Moon

The moon this morning is beautiful. I find a setting moon to be soothing. Looking backward to Adam and forward to Adam’s immortality, meaning the survival of the human species, I suspect these soothing feelings have always been there and always will be. The feelings elicited by commonplace heavenly phenomena serve as markers of our common selves. The self insofar as the body is concerned can simply confirm by conversation: “isn’t that a beautiful moon” one body asks. Another answers and the bodies’ sense of selves’ common experience are, both, very small and hugely big. Such things comprise our DNA plus culture.

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There exists a multi-layered information meta-universe of meaning and truth. Yet the closer the detail of truth itself be known, the further away is the simple, unspoken DNA experiential truth.
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1119 digg Analysis Process

Sunday, November 23rd, 2008

PAGE: http://digg.com/design/Useful_digger_Analysis_Process

The now present blog entry presents an analysis of one personal experience in the digg.com website. This document seeks to honor and elevate the digg™ community as a fun and useful adjunct to a time rich life.

STEP: Create digg™ Item
http://digg.com/odd_stuff/Unusual_Mixture_of_Hand_Writing_and_Computer_Writing
This digg™ (their trademark not PEA™) post is intended to promote the idea of blog pages comprised of a mixture of hand written pages and computer written pages.

The blog is reported in the category of “Odd Stuff” which seems most appropriate given the nature of both what is being done in digg™ as well as what is being done in http://blog.peaceengine.com. The title is clear and the entire entry is truthful.
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image_11
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STEP: See digg™ item in time sequenced list of upcoming items.
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STEP: View digg™ item in context of the local blog directories.
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1119_13
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STEP: Witness that neighbors get votes.
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1119_14
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STEP: Witness traffic at peaceengine.com
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1119_15
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STEP: One hour later with only 1 digg
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1119_16
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STEP: Add first fan as first friend.
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1119_17
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STEP: Add hand written page demonstrating universal PEA™ property mark (a digit 1 inside of digit zero and a letter I inside of a letter O and a line segment inside of a circle)
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1119_18
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Add a scanned image of my face to the Internet.
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1118 On Writing

Saturday, November 22nd, 2008

Saturday, November 22, 2008
Remembrance

He awoke early, upon a Saturday morning. In truth, his body merely thought it had to get up and go to work. As he lay in bed he told himself that it was Saturday because yesterday had been Friday. Acting accordingly, he made his way to the garage and took up station in his smoking chair. It was the place he sat while he did his best work, often while smoking a cigar or a pipe.

The garage had been cold because the outside temperature was a few degrees below freezing. The temperature in the garage in winter is always somewhere between the inside house temperature and the outside house temperature.

As he sat in his smoking chair he surfed hither and yon, inside his computer and upon the Internet. He came to a point of pause in his working to reflect upon why he was in such a frenetic hurry to find something to do with his time.

He thought about writing; he thought about writing about one’s self from a lofty place in the third person. Should he gather pen and journal for a hand writing and drawing experience or should he use his computer and maybe blog a writing for the day. Blog it was. And then he stopped. The inspiration for the writing had disappeared.

November 22, 1963 had been a school day, Friday. As he stood in line waiting to put lunch on his tray, the loud speaker had carried the announcement that John Kennedy had been shot. He remembered his feeling of shock and disbelief. His body shuddered for a brief moment as the memory reclaimed him. When he closed his eyes he could almost become that thirteen year old boy again. In those days he had first experienced death. First John Kennedy had been killed and then his beloved grandmother had died.

He had only known his grandmother for a few years and now she was gone. He witnessed the family grief. He had wept and clung to his father for support. His mother had sat with her brothers and sisters because it was their mother who had died. The seven children, Art, Alice, Ruth, Helen, Irene, Phylis, and John sat together. The boy stood with his father and his father’s brothers.

During times of body feeling remembrance, those who had died live again, inside of him. It is as if his body played host to a soul drop of a departed soul.

Whether one believes in God or not is quite beside the point of human life. To the young one must speak as if God exists or be silent. The point of God existence in human life is to create a way of the soul feeling separated from self and elevated unto the divine. The imaginary belief in God serves a necessary purpose in everyday human soul life. To live life as if God exists is better than to thinking, speaking, or doing as if God did not exist.

* * * * * * *

Writing is about simply opening the body and letting the words flow from the fingertips. That’s where the problems arise. Nobody can write everything perfectly unless they are copying some pre-written work. The writing process involves correcting mistakes. One difference between writing on the computer and writing with a pen is that the computer permits quick editing. Writers speak of the personified muse giving rise to the upwelling of information from deep in the subconscious. The subconscious tends to operate of its own accord. The key to raw writing is to let the pen flow wherever it wills. The same can be done upon the computer.

Being unable to touch type is a handicap for a writer. It is important to be able to read what one has written in order to construct a proper sentence. having to look at the keyboard cause one to have to write the sentence as best remembered. Being able to look at the screen while typing helps in sentence construction.

While it may be true that hand writing is slower that touch typing into a computer, hand writing forces the writer to pay attention to proper sentence construction. Computer writing permits easy editing and writing error repair. The best trick to computer writing ever invented, is the dual opening of the final document and an associated outtakes file. This technique permits the writer a quick emotional release by allowing them to cut poorly written material out of the final document and drop it into the outtakes. The alternative is to invest additional time editing material that may even be off topic

Let me contrast the above two hours computer time with the twenty minutes handwriting below. Of the time invested thus far, which is of better service to humanity.

1) the above computer writing
2) the below handwriting
3) the artful blending of 1) and 2)
4) the patent rights claimed in the name of Peace Engine™ Automata (PEA™) License

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1112 Beginning a Blog

Sunday, September 28th, 2008

It is fun to experiment with WordPress, which is the blogging software utilized for blog.peaceengine.com. It is interesting to mix words and 20080928_blog pictures together to see the effect. It is interesting to observe how the browser presents the picture differently.

It is fun to click on the thumbnail and see the picture of the handwriting showing up more visibly. I wonder how the software would react to a second thumbnail thrown into the middle of this paragraph. 2nd Snip Test SampleWell, the results are in.

I am not sure that anything grand has been discovered thus far, other than the need for some text flow directive concerning how the text is supposed to flow, with respect to its adjacent picture.