I’ve decided to stop using the Mac Mini in my apartment as my webserver for sites I am hosting for a couple of reasons. The most significant of them being the choked upload speed on my cable modem. I was getting something around 500 kbps which is quite slow when serving a number of images on a page. The other big reason was my general feeling that if I was going to use my site for professional things it probably ought to be professionally hosted.

I really would have like to have been able to use MediaTemple’s Grid Service offering because the sites I’m currently hosting are pretty low bandwidth and don’t really get many visitors but not having root access to my server was pretty much a deal breaker for me. So now I’m in the process of setting up my brand new Dedicated-Virtual server which hopefully will go smoothly.

Of course I expect a little downtime when I transition over but I don’t imagine that many folks will notice.

Update: Once I got the whole Plesk domains thing figured out (basically where do the document files go) this transfer turned out to be kind of easy. It’s all about that first little step.

The basic structure and functionality of my attempt at a Wordpress template is pretty much finished and so now I must style it. Styling will probably take a while so my site will probably look a little ugly for the time when I’m working on it and it make take quite a while considering I’m already having trouble getting the content and sidebar to display the way I want them too.

Here’s hoping for flash in the pan genius!

Update: I’m not yet happy enough with the way the theme looks to leave it for any length of time, so I’m falling back to the classic theme I was previously using. Soon I shall unleash it on the world… soon. Actually I’ll probably be better off creating a new Wordpress install for testing the theme out because then I can put all kinds of crazy stuff in posts without polluting my own content. We shall also see how that goes.

Update2: I decided to move theme development and testing to a test blog which is now up and running at test.bryanjswift.com.

In starting to use this blog again I have come to the conclusion that I am not particularly fond of any of the themes I’ve used, probably in large part because I’m not totally sure where to start in order to customize them. As a result I think I’m going to take a foray into creating my own theme but for now I think I’m going to leave the ‘classic’ wordpress theme in place because I like it’s minimalist approach.

I do have a curiosity though, where can I find the set of test posts used on some of the theme websites? If anyone finds this and knows I’d appreciate the help. I think I’m going to try and keep the theme I create a minimal, two-column, fluid theme. Structure first, layout later.