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| Written by Jono Cono I started Friday evening and somewhat apprehensively I must say, setting myself about upgrading my WordPress blog. As I had posted previously it’s been about a year and a half since my blog was up and running. I had made no (backend) updates to it and in all honesty really slacked off over time maintaining my blog. Most importantly I started with backing everything up including all files and databases/tables etc. With the updated download files available from WordPress once again, I downloaded the most current version of WordPress and upgraded all the core files on the server. The upgrade went very well and quite smoothly in fact, I didn’t suffer any issues with that part of it.
With that complete my next task was to change my theme and get everything in good working order. While it was easy to change the theme itself it’s been more time consuming getting everything working the way I like it. My new theme scales itself which is great for different screen sizes, resolutions and browser window sizes. I added back in all the little things that I like such as author name on each post. I also added social bookmarking links just in case people want to bookmark something.
Going through all of my plugins and getting rid of the ones that don’t work, ones I don’t use or otherwise don’t need has taken up most of my time. I got rid of a whole slew of plugins, upgraded some of them and added new ones. While my current theme supports widgets I’m not using widgets of any sort. The problem with widgets is that you have to pretty much go the whole “all or nothing” route. I like my right sidebar the way it is and using widgets destroys the current layout. There are still more plugins that I’d like to add and configure which can be tedious at times.
I don’t know the first or last thing about PHP although this time around it has been easier than the first time I configured my blog and was seeing everything for the first time. If you take my social bookmarking plugin that appears after each post, it looks to be a simple enough item. I had a heck of a time trying to find one little snippet of code in the file that runs the plugin for just one little discrepancy. My theme automatically picks up links and title tags and displays them on mouseover. The social bookmarking plugin also had this built in so I was ending up with duplicated title tags each with their own visual representation. It obviously looked bad so a hunting I went to find and get rid of the code causing the issue. It took me a while but I found it.
I’m going to be putting a lot of time over the next little while into my blog. I still have a lot of backend work to do such as cleaning up some posts, deleting old images, banning spammers from my site, among other things. Hopefully you enjoy the new theme and layout, there may be a few inconsistencies while I continue working on it but these should be taken care of quickly.
