WordPress 3.0: Thelonious

After a lot of wrangling of PHP, HTML, a tiny bit of JAVA, a little CSS, and redirecting some RSS, BLHill.net is now on a new server running the latest version of WordPress.

WordPress 3.0 is a massive upgrade from the previous version. For me the most important part was merging of WPMU, or WordPress Multi-User, into the code base. This allowed me to set up one installation of WordPress to host all of my websites. I am only running a few sites right now, but plan to add more. Some people are running thousands of sites using a single WordPress installation including WordPress.com, which hosts over 100,000 blogs.

Now let’s talk about whom this release is named after – Thelonious Monk. Thelonious Sphere Monk was a jazz pianist. But saying Monk was just a jazz pianist is like saying Steve Wozniak is just a computer geek. Go learn more about Thelonious Monk, buy his music or find out about his son’s work. (Incidentally, when I played the Playboy© Jazz Festival at the Hollywood Bowl, T.S. Monk, opened for us…)

I’m hoping that the move to a grid hosting plan at GoDaddy, will result in quicker response and better stability for my sites. I’ve heard good things and am hoping that affordable hosting can in fact be reliable.

I’ll be trying to post here more often, but much more will come from my newsletter, as well as on Twitter. I have a new site in the works and AEC Forensics . com will be updated soon with an amazing theme and a lot more content.

Stay tuned…

some geeky stuff:
And as a postscript, I like to briefly mention a topic that has been getting a little heated: WordPress, the GPL and premium themes. I don’t know legally if a WordPress theme would be defined as derivative or not, thereby requiring adherence to the GPL. But, I have chosen instead to avoid the controversy by installing an amazing theme by Sayontan Sinha called Suffusion that is open source and mind-numbingly flexible. In fact, after hearing some of Matt Mullenweg’s opinions on the subject, as well as revisiting some of Cory Doctorow’s perspective, I’m seriously considering going completely open source, and ditching proprietary/closed-source software. We’ll see.