Being a consultant you are constantly, though rightfully, asked by the clients to document everything before you leave. Now updating my personal blog I am my own client so why be partial towards oneself. Here is what I did to update Beta Thoughts to version 3.0.

1. Download Latest Nightly

2. Adapt Ryan’s Kubrick Theme
a. style.css for width and color changes
b. header.php for header image width
c. Create pages for Links template and Archives template

3. Introduce Navigation based on Listamatic’s Simple Horizontal List
a. style.css for navlist
b. create a navigation.php and include it in header.php to show on every page

4. Plugins
a. Brian’s Latest Comment for Activity in the sidebar -
b. Nick Momriks Recent Posts for Other Recent Posts in the sidebar
c. Alex’s Related Posts on the Single Post page
d. Kitten’s Spam Words
e. Matt’s Spam Stopgap

5. Announce on WordPress Support Forum

In the past year I have installed wordpress so many times that installation of it has become a very trivial process for me. Of course wordpress developers have worked to make it this simple. Here is the process I follow

1. Create the database for WP from cpanel.
2. Create the user for this DB or use an existing user. Assign ALL_PRIVILEGES to this user for the newly created database.
3. Download the latest WP nightly from wordpress site and extract it in a separate directory. This will create a wordpress directory.
4. Change to this directory and copy wp-config-sample.php file as wp-config.php.
   Edit wp-config.php file to reflect the settings for database, db user, and db password created above.

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A nice tip from PCWorld.com – Busting the Biggest PC Myths

If you’re using Windows XP, right-click the desktop, choose New, Shortcut, type shutdown -s -t 00, click Next, give the shortcut a name (for example, Shutdown), and click Finish. Next time you need to shut down, click the shortcut icon.