It was functional, but bland and constrained.
Well designed and supported Semiologic system was used. It consisted of modified WordPress software and multitude of plugins seamlessly integrated and preconfigured. Because of the modifications it was difficult to use templates or themes not specifically designed for it. Theme templates included with it were rather simple to be polite. New, more appealing themes and skins (modified colors and fonts) were added recently. At $295 initially and upgrades at about $170 per year it was relatively expensive for hobbyists. It is primarily used by people trying to sell or market their wares or ideas. You can try it by downloading the free Semiologic theme or purchase Semiologic Pro from semiologic.com site.

Current layout and design is possible by using the Hybrid theme and Life Collage child theme.
Hybrid is well designed semantically. It can be modified by using the basic structure of Hybrid theme and just adding the child theme which contains only the modifications. The Hybrid theme is free, but if you have questions the support is $20 per year. The price is right. After browsing the documentation and reading forums some changes were made to make the site looking the way I wanted it to look. I am tweaking it frequently because, as my niece says, I have OCD.

There are other less costly, like free or almost free, solutions. You can find them by browsing WordPress.org, not to be confused with WordPress.com which is a free web hosting service using WordPress software.

I have been using WordPress for a long time for several reasons. It is structurally well designed and easy to expand by using plugins. There are 7,185 official plugins as of this writing.

Layout and styling of the content is done by using themes. There are 1,042 free themes at this moment. All themes can be customized with choice of different colors, fonts and layout. For example you can chose to have your site with one, two or three columns, fixed or flexible width.

There are web site designers specializing in web templates for WordPress. Their well designed and good looking themes are offered for a fee.

Your friendly search engine will help you find what you are looking for. If you have specific questions, just ask. I will definitely have some answer for you.

There are some outrageous bids for domain names being auctioned off. How about $1,000,000.00 for pizza.com, is it too much?

Follow the link below to see for yourself.

http://greatdomains.com/search/searchresult.php4?auctionevent=Greatdomains

Clutter – no more.

For today, we got rid of categories, will just keep tags and mo more links.

I have to split my posts to more relevant and focussed groups.

Soon there will be no more Chinese software and wine in the bathroom and Mac should not mingle with Windows or Linux.

I do not do Windows, but I have windows to look outside.

What is the Microsoft Windows blue screen of death doing on my Mac?
I waited today half an hour for this thing to do something other than sit there. Nothing happened. Had to stop the virtual machine and close Parallels Desktop to get rid of it. This is normal behavior and usually I just close it without waiting. Today I wanted to see what happens if I give it some time and wait. Same thing. Nothing.

I do run MS XP Pro on my Mac when I have to check something in the native MS Windows environment using IE browser. I do not have physical machine to run that crap anymore. Parallels Desktop for Mac is perfect to run it. For $79.99 and the cost of XP Pro you get to have Windows on Mac. It behaves exactly like real XP, down to the blue screen of death. When I shutdown XP it gives me the standard windows closing sound and the blue screen.

I use it to check IE browser compatibility of websites, read documents in Word, Excel and PPS formats. I could convert the documents or use OpenOffice. However, it is infinitely better to use native platform on which the original was created. It is intuitive and obvious that use of native environment is best for quality control.

I fired the Firefox on the same site, the Flash Player appeared with all its buttons functional. Meanwhile for some reason the Adobe Updater started and asked if I wanted to download 136.5 MB of updates now or later. I let it rip. What choice did I have? Now or later, how about, go away you bloatware.

An ugly window opens up with the question – do you want to upgrade now? close all browsers and push go button. So I did. A long empty bar appeared and started filling up with a blue moving stripe. It stopped moving and got stuck almost halfway trough the empty bar. I waited ten or fifteen minutes. Nothing. still stuck in the same spot, right under the letter h in Flash. Cancel, reboot and try again. Same thing, stuck under letter h. Enough fun for today, it is too late, go sleep, will try in the morning.

In the morning the blue stripe got stuck in the same spot, I let sit there for half an hour. It started moving again and got stuck close to the end. I waited another half an hour. Nothing. Cancel and reboot. Do it again. Stuck again at the end. Wait, talk on the phone, do not pay attention to it. Check fifteen minutes later – success, done.

I do not have any problems upgrading any other applications. None require closing browsers and upgrade themselves while previous version is still running.

It is obvious from this abnormal behavior that something is wrong with Adobe software. What is in 136.5 MB of upgrades for one application? Replacement of the whole code that can not even replace itself?

Presentation of the Adobe wares is excellent. Watching the Flash demos on their website makes you want to have the software. That is how they got me to buy their new CS3 for Mac. Perhaps the people making the presentations should be involved in writing the application software, so the customer will get exactly what is being advertised, not the extreme bloatware that is being produced now.