Thoughts from the mountains

I've used Firefox as my browser of choice for a long time. I've also used IE Tab for the times that I absolutely need the IE rendering engine for a specific site. A perfect example of this is when I'm using Outlook for the web access for viewing my work email on the web. Only the IE rendering engine can provide the proper interface while using Outlook for the web. IE Tab is also really nice when doing development as you can view rendering for two different browsers with the convenience of staying in one.

Now that I placed my first Mango Blog theme available for download on my projects page I wanted to be able to track if or how often it is downloaded. I thought about a possible plug in after looking at Paul Klinkenberg viewcount plug in, but decided to keep things simple and use event tracking in Google analytics.

Tonight I made a decision to move my blog to a different domain and because of that a new location on my server. Originally, I placed the blog under one of my photography related domain names with the plan to make posts about web development and photography all in one place. After a week or so passed, I decided that it was best to maintain completely separate blogs for content that is really unrelated. So, I made the change tonight which should have been really fast but instead took a little longer than it probably should have.

One of my goals for this blog was to learn how to create themes for Mango. I looked at the guides for creating a theme on the Mango site and Benedict Lowndes blog and then started to try to make my own custom changes to the existing Happy Blog theme. While this worked in theory, my lack of design skills immediately stood out as the theme I created from customizing the Happy Blog theme was atrociously horrible looking.

My blog is still very new and has yet to recieve an authentic comment from a real reader but there has been many attempts to post spam in the comments. Being new to the Mango blog engine I researched my options to see what would be the best compromise between usability for the user and effectiviness at stopping comment spam.