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WordPress themes

Semi-Sweet Morsels

by Rick on July 29, 2008

I have had writer’s block for the past couple of days, and I do apologize for that to anyone who looks for updates here at Kingdom Geek.

  • Things have been pretty busy, though, for which I’m thankful. Notably, I’ve been spending a lot of my free time — when I’m not watching The X-Files — providing support at the DIY Themes support forums. What began as simply helping out the community so that I could better learn the theme I’m using here has turned out to be (potentially) fairly lucrative. More on that later, and no I’m not referring to the referral program — I suck at affiliate marketing anyway. Suffice it to say, if the current plans pan out, my monthly income could be increasing by 50%, which if you knew the numbers is quite a meager amount anyway, but it is an answer to a prayer and a concern of mine and it could not have come at a better time.
  • Aside from that, I’ve been toying around with building a theology wiki from scratch — for like the umpteenth time. Currently it resides in an undisclosed location and will not be made public until I have enough content there to give visitors an idea of the direction the site will be moving in. The ultimate, pie-in-the-sky goal is to create a solid online Bible commentary, a place where people can get answers to questions like “Why did Balaam’s ass talk?” or “Who is the Antichrist, and do I need to be worried about microchips in my credit cards?” Oh sure, there are resources out there — the Wikipedia comes to mind. And there are certainly other theology wikis. Still, I want to see where this project goes. At the moment, there is one true article, and I’m quite happy with how it turned out — notwithstanding self-criticism.
  • Oh, and I don’t know if I can blame Colin for this or not, but lately I’ve been wanting to switch to a Mac system. I really can’t explain it, especially given that Windows works decent enough. Some of the time. Bleh. Oh, and a random bit of trivia: If you go to the Apple store and customize a Mac Pro, you can quite easily push it’s price above the $25,000 mark. Now I know what kind of computer Bill Gates uses at home when nobody’s looking.
  • And speaking of Colin, if you are on Facebook, you should check out the PackRat application. It’s an amazingly addictive little card game. I still play it every now and again and there is always more to accomplish on there. Disclaimer: Don’t blame me if you start playing PackRat and real life passes you by.
  • For the past couple of nights and tonight I’ve been working overnights with a couple of friends to get the sporting goods department ready for the fall season. Throwing your sleep / activity pattern really takes its toll. I’m exhausted. Either way, it’s a lot of fun, and it’s nice being in the store without customers and during the time that they play in-store music. We miss that so much during the day.
  • I’d be remiss if I didn’t include something about what I’m listening to currently, and right now I’m digging Chris Thile’s How to Grow a Woman from the Ground. Good stuff, especially “Wayside (Back in Time).”
  • My phone had something spilled on it, effectively putting it out of commission. (No, it honestly was not my fault!) Destroyed gadgets lead to new gadgets, and I’ll now be carrying around a shiny, new enV2. I haven’t actually seen it yet, though; Alicia picked it up while she was in Indy today, so I may not see until tomorrow when I get off work. Danged anticipation. Ah well. :-)
  • I’m using Popularity Contest here now which keeps track of the popularity of each post based upon comments, TrackBacks, PingBacks, and various types of page views (direct, in a feed, on the index page, and so on). A list of the most popular posts is in the sidebar now, and at the end of each post the post’s popularity is shown as a percentage of the most popular post. (A post which shows “Popularity: 33%” is 33% as popular as the most popular post. I hope that makes sense (and is accurate)! If you’re new here, check out the list in the sidebar to see what’s hot!
  • Lastly, I’m seeing The Dark Knight again with my wife and some friends on Thursday. If you haven’t seen it, it’s an amazing movie. There’s been a lot of philosophy/theology buzz throughout the blogosophere — at least my region of it — regarding the movie, so I’m going to try to watch the movie with a more attuned eye this time around.

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NeoBox Demo Site

by Rick on June 7, 2008

The official NeoBox demo site is online now! (Download NeoBox here.)

If you’ve been itching for an ultra-semantic, simplistic, easy-to-use theme for your WordPress blog, check out NeoBox. I’m very happy with how it has turned out, even if it is a Frankenstein’s Monster combination of varied parts.

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NeoBox 0.5 Released

by Rick on June 5, 2008

It’s late, and I don’t have much time to write this so please forgive my brevity:

I am pleased to announce that NeoBox 0.5 is now available for download! This is the biggest milestone yet for NeoBox, which I hope proves to be a useful WordPress theme for someone out there.

NeoBox will still be under active development so check back for updates, but version 0.5 should be pretty solid. Please let me know about any bugs or feature requests or anything else (feel free to add them to the comments here).

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Week Wrap-Up

by Rick on June 1, 2008

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged, and I apologize for that. I spent the week watching movies & playing video games — particularly the most excellent Wii 2-in-1 game The House of the Dead 2 & 3 — with my step-brother. Even aside from the five days he visited, it’s been busy.

Last weekend, Alicia & I hosted the annual Memorial Day gathering for Dad’s side of the family, which was quite an experience. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to Alicia’s mom for helping us prepare for the gathering — my cooking / domestic skills being fairly elementary and Alicia being sidelined due to (minor) injury, so to speak.1

Still, I tried my hand at grilling burgers on an outdoors grill for the first time. Alicia was close at hand to supervise, and my aunts and uncle offered some great bits of advice as well. The first batch of burgers wound up not being fully cooked, but now I know how to check for that. The second round went over with everyone very nicely, and a few days later I grilled some more for my brother, Alicia, and I. Yes, I realize 25 is probably far too late to be learning how to cook something as simple as a hamburger, you don’t have to tell me that. :-)

If you’ve been reading here lately, you’ve surely noticed that I’ve been working on a new(ish) WordPress theme called NeoBox, which will be, I guess, a fork of the theme I use here.2 So that’s been occupying a lot of my time as well. I’m very happy with the progress I’m making on it, even if the 0.5 release will essentially be completely different from the 0.4, representing a change in direction I’m taking in development. When I first started working on 0.5 features, I realized I was biting much more than I could chew and had lost site of what NeoBox was initially supposed to be. So now, 0.5 is back on track, I’m nowhere near “finishing” it for release, and even after 0.5 is released, there’s still so much to do!

I won’t say much about NeoBox, and if you try out the 0.4 release, you may not be totally impressed. That’s fine, but 0.4 is not quite representative of the final release, let alone 0.5. Stay tuned!

Now, just for fun, here are some ultra-brief ratings for movies I’ve seen recently and games I’ve been digging lately:

  • Iron Man - Great movie, stunningly realistic graphics, fun script - 9.5/10
  • Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - Decent movie, too much Mutt and not enough Marian, lost a lot of the spirit of the previous movies - 5.5/10 - Aside: The character of Indiana, despite being invulnerable to even the largest of explosions, isn’t much different from real men. After witnessing the power of God and His Christ through the Ark and Grail adventures, he seems unaffected and unchanged; seems quite like how the apostles were after seeing Christ crucified — He had performed miracles and appeared in glory before them, but when push comes to shove, it’s always easier to walk away. Indiana, rather than walking away, seems to have simply forgotten. Yes, I realize this aside is longer than the main point of this list item. :-)
  • Hellboy - Good movie, interesting storyline and mythos (think H. P. Lovecraft), seemed anti-climactic at times - 7/10
  • Super Smash Bros. Brawl - The best Wii game I’ve played yet. There is frankly too much to do in this game! Sure, I’m close to 100% in the adventure mode and I’ve opened up all of the characters, but I’m achieved less than 50% of the challenges, still have well over 250 trophies to earn, plenty of events to clear… Nintendo outdid themselves with this one. The inclusion of Solid Snake & Sonic the Hedgehog are just icing on the cake, and I love the Knuckles cameo in the Green Hill Zone level!
  • Mario Kart Wii - I want to simply love this game. I really do! My last encounter with the Kart series was Mario Kart 64, and I spent so many hours on that thing that without much effort I could shatter the pro records published in the Nintendo Player’s Guide. Mario Kart Wii isn’t garnering that sort of addiction from me. I won’t deny the game is fun — and funner with friends — but the game just doesn’t seem as polished as it could/should have been. The amazing detail of Super Smash Bros. Brawl is nowhere to be found. The tracks — even the classic tracks that I’m used to — seem way too short. Either the vehicles are moving way too fast, or in an effort to dumb this down as much as possible into a party game, the tracks had a strict shortness guideline… I for one miss the six minute+ epic races on Rainbow Road in Mario Kart 64. Item balancing is terrible — being in first place was never so frustrating in Super Mario Kart or Mario Kart 64. Still, I spent $3 to rent Super Mario Galaxy just to open up another character in Mario Kart Wii (Rosalina), and I love the ability to race as my Mii. When all is said and done, though, I can’t help but compare this side-by-side with Super Smash Bros. Brawl as they are two games released at the same time with Mario as the front man. If you have to choose, get Smash Bros. It has more characters, more levels, more items, more modes, more challenges, more detail, more, more, more, more, more.
  • The House of the Dead 2 & 3 - These are by no means new games — I had 2 on the DreamCast six or seven years ago — but the graphics are still gorgeous (especially when compared to Mario Kart Wii), and the gameplay seems perfectly suited to the Wii. Buy a Zapper accessory for some truly enjoyable zombie fragging. Definitely play with a friend, and blast away!
  1. She’s doing great, your prayers for healing are appreciated, and thanks for the concern. [↩]
  2. Neoclassical by Chris Pearson. [↩]

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Building a Better WordPress Theme: NeoBox

by Rick on May 25, 2008

I’m working on a WordPress theme called NeoBox which you are welcome to download via my Freebies page; it’s nowhere near completion, and stylistically it’s still just like the theme I’m using here — Neoclassical. The download page tells more about it.

However, I’m posting this in the hopes of getting any useful feedback for making NeoBox as good as possible. So, a few questions that I want as many people to answer as possible; it doesn’t matter when you post, I’ll keep monitoring the comments on this page for as long as NeoBox is being maintained, which will be quite a while, I hope!

  • What complaints do you have about most WordPress themes? What is missing that should be added or is there that has no use?
  • What plugins do you use which output into the theme? In an effort to make NeoBox as easy as possible, I’m going to go all out with plugin integration provided that it doesn’t become a performance bottleneck.
  • What else can be done to make NeoBox — which will, as previously said, look a lot like Neoclassical, the theme in use here — stand heads & shoulders above other available themes?

I very much want NeoBox to be something special. It isn’t anywhere near that point yet as I’ve not been able to devote a great deal of time to its development, but I do have big hopes for it. If you run a WordPress blog, check out NeoBox, and let me know what else it should have, do, or be!

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