Over the course of it’s short history, this blog has had four different themes, the latest of which being my own customised variant of Dezzain’s Zoxengen. It’s predecessor’s have included Andreas04, Andreas09 and Prosumer. I have tinkered with all of these to varying degrees but each has offered me a certain something before I set about my tweaks. Zoxengen is no different and its clean lines and Web 2.0 feel attracted my attention. Other little features like seeing related posts listing on a post’s comments page or listing the tags associated with a post under its title line are, I hope, useful little extras. Correcting English (I may be digging a hole for myself here) and removing advertising slots (for me, this blogging business is a hobby so you’ll find no ads on any of my blogs) both seem to be a necessary tasks when implementing themes these times but the really major change was to make the design more flexible when it comes to different screen sizes, something that I hope to have achieved by allowing it to fill more of the browser window. There may be more changes, hopefully small, but I hope that you find the result as pleasing on the eye as I do.

Update: The blog’s current theme came with a lot of text that was written in poor English. While I should have got rid of all of it from the theme by now, there may be some still lurking here somewhere. If I find any more, it’ll get sorted. If something has escaped my notice for whatever reason, please let me know.

By default, Evolution doesn’t display images in HTML emails. It’s a good security and anti-spam practice but it’s also nice to have the ability to override this behaviour. The Ctrl+I keyboard shortcut (View>Show Images is the way to do it through the menus) will do the trick on an email by email basis but you need to add the email address to your address book for a more permanent approach. There’s a little extra to make the latter work and it involves heading to Evolution’s Preferences dialogue box (Shft+Ctrl+S or View>Preferences) and selecting Mail Preferences from the sidebar. Clicking on Mail Preferences gets you where you need to be. The part of the screen that’s relevant is Loading Images and there are three options: Load images in email from contacts is the option that you probably want more than Always load images from the Internet because keeping Evolution’s anti-spam defaults is probably a very good idea. Apart from sender whose images you don’t want to see, you should now have images displaying in HTML emails.

Aside: The theme in use for the above screen capture was from Ubuntu Studio rather than SlicknesS, which is my usual choice. The latter makes the above screen unusable because the text cannot be distinguished from the background and it’s only for this tab that it happens too, a combination of posssible Evolution programming inconsistencies colliding with potential theme design gremlins in my view.

I have had a look on how the posts from this blog are listed on Technorati and most if not all of the titles are coming through as "Permalink". I was going to try WordPress.com support but they are off for the weekend. A trip to the WordPress.com forums was then in order and a few helpful folk put me right on this one: apparently Technorati uses the permalink titles when extracting post summaries from WordPress.com blogs and in the Andreas04 theme that I am using, these are all hard-coded as "Permalink". I have left the theme’s author in on this and going to try WordPress.com feedback tomorrow. In technical terms and from what I can see, the fix needed is as follows: change title="Permalink" to title="Permanent Link: <?php the_title(); ?>" in the single.php, page.php and index.php files in the theme.