The limitations of WordPress were found quite fast. I’ve been building the site less than a week and now I had to install another instance of WordPress to be able to create semi-static pages for travel tips. Now I have to edit templates on two different places, and that may become a real pain in the future…

I migrated my own website management tool to work with the blogs and I’m going to use it to manage the rest of the pages. That transition was painless, and I simultaneously implemented common templates for all pages, including WP driven ones. This surely reduces my efforts in the future.

Talking of templates, I have been able to concentrate only on minor tweaking lately. The layout seems to be settled and there were no huge catastrophes. Of course, the site is not yet in a full-blown use, so some comment and other blog related page may be ugly. I’d better start to mimic a user and try all different possibilities to read and use the blog…

It is not very easy to book discounted hotels nowadays. First, you have to browse through the number of different hotel reservation services found in Google and choose a few for closer inspection. Most of these different services are just frontends to the same reservation system, and you get exactly the same prices.

You can also get “unbeatable” prices from priceline.com or hotwire.com, but alas, when you try to purchase something, they complain about your credit card:

At this time, our online security policy does not allow us to accept credit cards from this bank.

Unfortunately, all Finnish Visa cards come from one institution, so changing a bank does not really help. Argh! Maybe I should get SAS EuroBonus MasterCard and ditch Visa.

The first part of the layout change is now completed. I have managed to get rid of most of the extra layout code buried in the default CSS file and changed the colours and graphics to reflect the overall design of the site.

I was surprised how many different settings there are in the CSS. Especially the number of different grays was baffling… For me, it looked like a bad design not to have a small and specific set of colours (or grays) used again and again in different occasions. Hopefully things are better now.

I also adjusted the default calendar to start weeks on Mondays. Surprisingly, this could not be set with a parameter (or I at least didn’t find any suitable), but I had to fix the PHP code. The calendar seems to be quite heavy component anyhow, as it makes five SQL queries. At least one of those queries is redundant, as WordPress should know already by this time whether there are entries in the database or not. Hopefully PHP and MySQL are optimised enough to endure these queries in heavier traffic.

I was training kayaking yesterday, and the feelings were quite awesome! Imagine sitting on the water level and moving swiftly and gracefully near the shores, watching the nature and the houses. We were in one of the poshest neighbourhoods in Helsinki and the subdued charm of the upper classes was reflected from the houses.

Most of the training took place in a calm lagoon that was surrounded with lush park and a palace — a rare thing in very flat society of Finland. Wish I had a waterproof camera with me…

I’ve had an unused domain for digital nomadism for a year and a half. The site design and related tasks were not on the fast track and I haven’t done anything for the past year. Maybe this is due to the fact that I’m better in programming and site designing that writing content.

Anyhow, last week I got an idea to turn the site into a blog and gradually add content and other interesting stuff here. Hopefully people can contribute, too.

The exact aim of the site is still a bit under formulation, and it will be something related to digital nomadism in the networked postmodern world. I try to deal with subjects related to travelling and wandering the globe, with a host of gadgets to keep myself connected with the electronic world. Sounds fun, eh?

The first thing for the new site was to select a blogging system. As I’m computer and programming professional, I toyed a few days with the idea of writing the whole stuff myself. The main reason for this was that the decent blogging systems lack default WYSIWYG editors (or at least I didn’t find them from blogging server reviews) and the default templates look ugly.

I finally decided against writing my own — I have better things to do, such as travelling or writing into the blog — and installed WordPress. The installation was a breeze, and I could configure the system without too much of hassle.

When I took the first glance of my new blog, I was horrified as the result was ugly and the system showed error on the front page:

Before really opening the site, I have to redesign everything on the public blog pages, most probably from the scratch. After that I’ll have to find a better editor as this one sucks golf balls thru garden hose… How anyone can be satisfied with writing HTML in middle of the text when you could have WYSIWYG alternatives? And bear in mind that I have written HTML for ten years with emacs and such, so I know how to write it — but I just don’t want to do it anymore, if possible.

Time will tell whether I’m still happy with WordPress after the task.