If you’ve visited this website before, you probably notice the completely different look. Yup, it was time again for a major make-over as my previous theme was 2 years old. And that’s an eternity on the internet 😉
To get to this new look, I started with installing Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on a second PC. This is really easy nowadays. In this case I choose the Ubuntu Windows installer so I can now multiboot the pc between Windows and Ubuntu. After I installed the OS, I made the desktop accessible by VNC (for which I use UltraVNC), so I can operate the second PC from my main PC. After that I installed a LAMP server. This installs everything you’d need for your own webserver at home. I was actually suprised by the easy installation, as I remember the “good ol’ days” (which weren’t that good as installing and configuring could easily take an entire day).
Next step was to install an FTP server. I choose vsftpd which is a very stable and fast FTP daemon.
Now that the home webserver was all up and running, I installed WordPress using the Famous 5 Minute Installation. I didn’t time it, but 5 minutes is pretty accurate.
Now it was time to find a usable WordPress theme that was configurable, had widget-support and looked completely different than my previous theme. After a few tries I found Calypso as the best candidate. I needed a few changes however. The theme has four squares for sponsor statements (which I don’t have) hardcoded in the theme, so these had to be deleted. There is a Facebook icon, which I don’t use. But I missed icons for Flickr and Last.fm. I made the Flickr icon myself, and used the official Last.fm icon. These are now hardcoded in the theme.
So in the end, I got the theme configured and partly recoded to my likings, after which I installed it on my ‘real’ webserver. Hope you like it, let me know in the comments 🙂