One of the great things about WordPress is the community and the number of great plugins that can do amazing things with little effort.

But all that code, as any good developer will tell you, is a liability. How do you pick a plugin that not only meets your requirements now, but will both continue to do so? WordPress advances. APIs change. Plugins need love too.

Many moons ago I settled upon Flickr Gallery, a plugin that allows you to import Flickr images just by adding a short-code to posts. I thought there was value in keeping all my public photos in one place and, at that time, WordPress had poor media management facilities. The plugin seemed popular and well supported.

So there I was, trying to be a good Internet citizen. I updated my web server to use the latest version of Linux and… Boom! It would display the first post and then just peter out.

Unfortunately I don’t have the time or patience right now to track down exactly what the problem is — presumably something to do with PHP — so here you go: a new theme. It’s one of the ones I considered before I switched last time. A bit more minimal, more monochrome than last time. I like the minimal, and the lack of colour makes the pictures pop a bit more so it’s not all bad.

• 2.8 Release Jazzes Themes and Widgets – I just upgraded ZX81 to the latest version of WordPress. Let me know if you see anything that’s not working properly!
• Chinese troops out in force for 20th anniversary of ‘nothing happening’ – “Many people who were in the area in 1989 were expected to observe the anniversary by staying at home and doing nothing special, much as they did 20 years ago.”
• Behind the Scenes: Tank Man of Tiananmen – “Few images are more recognizable or more evocative. Known simply as ’tank man,’ it is one of the most famous photographs in recent history.”

You may have noticed that ZX81.org.uk has been offline for at least twenty-fours hours. I don’t know exactly how long, but I first noticed about this time yesterday.

At the moment I have no idea what happened. The company hosting the site have not been terribly forthcoming — no response to the support tickets I raised, no public announcement of the down time — which in a sense is even more disappointing that the downtime. No system is 100% reliable, but you should at least communicate with those most affected.

• Ars Book Review: “Patent Failure” – Interesting book review about the effect of patents on an industry. Apparently cost more money than they make in anything but chemical and pharmaceuticals.
• Lucky to be a Programmer – I don’t program as much as I used to but this explains why I love to when I get the chance.
• WordPress 2.6 – Usual drill. I’ve upgraded to the latest version of WordPress, the underlying software of ZX81.org.uk. If you see anything wrong please let me know!
• 20 Amazing Facts About Voting in the USA – Still in any doubt that computerised voting machines are a bad idea for free and fair elections?

• An elephant never forgets? George W. Bush’s lost e-mails – “The administration has chafed at external oversight and shown a tendency to come up with dubious legal justifications for ignoring laws it doesn’t agree with.” Just what is Mr Bush trying to hide?
• WordPress 2.5.1 – I just upgraded to the newest version of WordPress. Looks good as far as I can see but let me know if you spot anything untoward.
• Madonna, Hard Candy – “It’s about grooves rather than memorable songs, and Madonna just doesn’t make for a convincing soul diva [as she] sings them with the emotional engagement of a sat-nav suggesting a right turn onto the A23.”

• Spam blights e-mail 15 years on – The thing that I’ll never understand is that some people must read spam otherwise it wouldn’t be a profitable business. Why?! My domain received over 40000 spam messages last month, none of which I’ve read so please stop sending them!
• WordPress 2.5 – I just upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. I don’t think I’ve managed to break anything but please do let me know if you know differently.
• Adobe Photoshop Express Now Live – A neat, on-line mini-Photoshop is now available in beta at least. Clearly some way short even of Elements but it’s probably sophisticated enough for a lot of people.

And welcome to the new look ZX81.org.uk! This time I decided to go “back to basics” with a relatively simple, low-graphics theme. Having said that, it’s not quite as basic as things were back in late 1999 when the site first went live¹. It’s less fussy than the old version and should load more quickly for those people not yet on broadband.

The boring details are: I’m using a slightly modified version of Dagon Design’s NightSky theme for WordPress. Other than a fairly extensive set of plugins, changes were to bring the theme in line for tags and to allow a daringfireball-style “linked list” rather than the rather more static del.ic.io.us list I had previously.

Ever since I moved over to using the WordPress content management system to host this website I have been using a relatively small number of plugins. One of my most used is Photopress which you can see in use almost everywhere you see a picture.

However, late last year I realised how much one, small part of the functionality irritated me. You could either view a full size picture in a page on its own, but I’d never managed to create a template that worked well for both portrait and landscape images. Or you could have each image pop up in another window. I wasn’t keen on that either.