Since installing the self-hosted WordPress.org software, I’ve had a few days of fiddling around with some of the features of the css stylesheet and the various php scripts that control this blog and, all in all, I’m impressed with what I’ve been able to do with it.

First and foremost, all those purty pictures that used to adorn the header of my blog, the ones that would change whenever I got bored of them, are now on a randomiser. So every time you reload, you’ll see a different image.

Secondly, I’ve integrated gravatars - globally recognised avatars - pretty much everywhere. So unless you want your comments to be illustrated with an anonymous-looking silhouette, you should go and get yourself a free gravatar.

Thirdly, as soon as you start writing a comment, you’ll notice a live preview underneath the comment box. It’ll even show your gravatar off to the side, if you have one. The live preview will interpret any licit html tags you want to include and will output exactly what will appear after you hit ‘submit’, so now you won’t have to email me and ask me to fix up your erroneous formatting tags.

Lastly, I’ve gone and got myself a Creative Commons license, and if you scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll see the image and link to the license in the footer. This is just to give me a bit of legal basis next time my posts get ‘content-scraped’ without attribution, and realistically, it’s better to be safe than sorry.

I just hope you enjoy using it as much as I’ve enjoyed customising it.