And, I think we’re back…

All of the blog upgrades are now done and everything seems to be working OK.  It’s nice that software developers continually upgrade their programs and provide bug fixes, but it does get annoying at times to have to do these constant upgrades.  This is my third upgrade this year (it’s only June) and I have skipped others that I could have done.  Once upon a time, I was a software developer myself and, having to work with my customers to upgrade their systems, I always tried to make it as painless as possible.  But it’s never completely painless…

So, for the moment, anyway, we’re on the current release of WordPress (2.2.1).  All of the security issues in the old release have been (supposedly) plugged – now we just have to wait for the hackers to find the holes in this release 🙂  Even the spelling checker works now!  But WordPress still can’t handle whitespace very well.  The pre 2.0 releases handled it just fine – if you wanted a couple of blank lines in your post, just hit the Return bar a couple of times and there you go.  Now, all of the extra whitespace is automatically deleted by the editor, an attempt, I suppose, to force everyone to modify the .css files instead.  Of course that complicates future upgrades…  WordPress has now also made Widgets the preferred method of maintaing the Sidebar (Widgets used to be available as a plugin, now it’s part of core code).  I could have kept all of my old sidebar hacks, but did want to upgrade to the new method, and that, of course, also complicated things.  They have Widgets called “Text Boxes”, basically places where you can plug in HTML code and place them on the sidebar where you want.  But Text boxes can’t handle php.  For that you need a plugin (Execphp), so I had to install that, too.  But at the end of the day it all seems to work and, I hope, future upgrades will be less lengthy…

I’ve also upgraded to the current release of the WordPress theme I use, Blix Krieg.  It is an offshoot of the original Blix theme, one which does not seem to be maintained anymore.  Blix Krieg is maintainted by theDuck, an Aussie who seems like a nice chap.  And the theme works flawlessly.

I’ve also dumped Sitemeter – it was just so unreliable.  It lost several days of statistics for me on more than one occasion, and I’ve long suspected it if undercounting my site visitors.  In it’s place, I’ve installed StatCounter.  Perhaps it’s just a busy day today, but already my site stats are higher than before.

Finally, I’ve also fixed (I hope) my RSS feeds.  I was using Feedburner but discovered, much to my dismay, that somehow I was burning two Feedburner feeds.  Perhaps this is why they weren’t working properly.  I’d like to thank all of my readers who took the time to either drop an comment or email to me to let me know how my RSS feed was working (or not) for them.  Hopefully, this is a solved problem now, too.

As always, if you run into something on my blog that doesn’t work, please let me know.

Now all I have to do is to get the long delayed photo gallery up and running and I’ll be all set…

3 thoughts on “And, I think we’re back…

  1. theDuck

    Good work mate! It looks great – cheers and glad it went relatively smoothly – if you check out functions.php, you’ll see how I’ve widgetized the default blix sidebar items – if you use my code as a basis, it should be easier to do them next time without having to resort to the variety of plugins you’ve discussed.

    Cheers,

    theDuck

  2. Ted Semon Post author

    I use to use Blogger, but did not like the outages I had to deal with nor the lack of flexibility that I found, so I switched to WordPress. Yes, it has it’s pains, but I don’t think I’m going back.

    At the end of the day you’re right – to each his own…

    And glad to see that you’re getting the RSS feed now – I sure hope I’ve slain that dragon…

    Thanks again for reading and keep up the great work on your blog.

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