Category: Blogging

As I’ve been going back through old entries marked as “uncategorized” I’ve been amazed at how many of them are about various aspects of blogging. Now that I’m in them midst of a serious site upgrade, I remember why there are so many of them.

When you’re busy upgrading there’s no time to read a poetry book, or even a book on Crow Planet. There’s barely enough time in the day to get done what you have to get done in order to keep the site up and running.

Jean kindly left a note mentioning that my site was loading extremely slowly, something I’d noted before but felt might be influenced on my end by all the plugins that allow me to work on my page directly from the site itself, not just from the dashboard. Once I heard that, though, I had to start looking for the cause of the problem. I suspected that one particular plugin might be causing the problem because it seemed to interact with other JavaScripts that I installed before and after it. Turned out that it wasn’t the source of the problem at all, but other plugins were.

In order to figure that out I had to turn off all the plugins and then start them up one at a time to see which ones were causing the problem. As a result, I don’t think the site looks as good, but there’s not much purpose of having a good-looking site if no one wants to stop by to visit, and it’s amazing how many visits in a day are for 30 seconds are less. As a result I reverted to some of the plugins that come standard with WordPress, and I moved my slow-loading blogroll to another page.

I didn’t like the large headline at the top of the page, but I did like the banner picture. In the process of turning the text portion of the header off, I ended up also turning off the image and had a heck of a time turning it back on. In the end, I ended up reinstalling WordPress, and even that didn’t entirely solve the problem. I would love to see some improvements in the way you import your own pictures to use in the header!

I continue to plug away at categorizing old entries. I’m not going to sit at a desk all day fixing them, but I am willing to waste some time while I’m waiting for Will and Judy to make their next move in Scrabble. I’ve done it so much that I’ve got the routine down to a matter of a few seconds per entry. While categorizing early entries, I found an inordinate number of entries that had been mangled moving from Blogger to MT to WordPress. They didn’t bother me when I didn’t know they were there, but once I spotted them I felt obligated to update them.

Reading early entries suggests that I tackled these problems with much greater enthusiasm that I’m tackling this reinvention, perhaps because I got so much help from others like Jonathan and Shelley as I tackled new obstacles. Of course, I also know a lot more now than I used to know and the web itself offers help that wasn’t there before.

I’m a little amazed by the changes that have taken place since I started blogging, both good and bad changes.

Hopefully you’ve found something that you like about my new site layout. There are several things I like about, though I’ll have to admit that I’m also ambivalent about a lot of the changes

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The most obvious of those changes is whether to go with the light or dark theme that comes standard with the Twenty Eleven Theme. I prefer the dark theme with the black background when an entry features photographs because it does a good job of setting them off. On the other hand, I definitely prefer the light theme when an entry consists mainly of words because I don’t like reading white letters on a black background. Overall, I think I’m favoring the light theme. Let me know if you have a definite preference.

I prefer the new way of listing categories, though I’m rather embarrassed by how many entries are “uncategorized.” In my defense, early programs I used to blog did not provide any means of categorizing entries. As a result, any of the entries from the first three years are so are “uncategorized.” Of course, procrastination and sheer laziness have also played a part in my failure to categorize effectively. As time allows, I’m going through some old entries and trying to categorize them and make them more accessible. I suppose I really ought to try to move into the present and use “tags,” but I wouldn’t count on that happening instantaneously.

I also prefer the new way of archiving, though I’ve noticed that all these JavaScript also slow down the loading of my page. Still, if the reader is actually interested in exploring my archives, the hierarchical approach makes that much easier, though it also makes it obvious that better titles would make my content more accessible.

I wish I’d found the new Blog list plugin that I’m using before I went through the list the other day looking for blogs that were no longer being updated. When I originally installed the plugin it listed the blogs in the order they had been updated (which I prefer), but installing two other plugins afterwards somehow disabled that feature and I haven’t been able to get it turned back on. Even before that, it was flawed as some sites would not show up as being updated even when I knew that they had been because I’d read them on my RSS feed. I suspect that it must have something to do with the way Google reads, or doesn’t read the sites, because the plugin depend on a Google API key. Needless to say, there was no way I was ever going to resolve these issues.

Behind the scenes I’m quite fond of the editor built into Jetpack, though I’ve just gone back and deleted the option to check for passive voice. I forgot how annoying I used to find that when using Microsoft Word. However, in the process of adding categories from some old entries, I’ve discovered a number of silly typos, the kind that are easily caught by an editor, and easily overlooked by a writer, that have managed to slip by me for a long time.

I’m beginning to remember why I procrastinate so long before updating my web site. I’m sure that I make updating harder than it needs to be, but all those years of advising yearbook have probably scarred me. I want things the way I want them to be; I want them to be “perfect,” or at least pass for perfect.

I spent most of a day learning how to upload pictures for the header, originally substituting my own photos for the photos that came with the theme. That worked for one photo, but it wouldn’t allow me to alternate pictures, something I was looking forward to. I had to review file permissions, only to discover in the end that I had failed to switch server addresses when my host switched servers.

Then I realized that the theme was displaying my photos at a reduced size and at a different width than the main copy. That just plain looked wrong to me. So I spent several hours looking at CSS code trying to figure out how to adjust the width. I ended up doing an online search on how to code a fixed width. Once I found that, it was relatively easy to make the adjustments I needed.

Today I went to work making sense out of the blogroll on the side. I didn’t have to figure out how to do anything, but it was the kind of work I really hate: boring, tedious, repetitive work. When I started a blogroll years ago there were no RSS readers, so I used the blogroll to visit fellow bloggers. For the last two or three years I’ve been using a RSS reader. Since it updates automatically, I tend to miss it when some bloggers quit blogging, especially if they never leave comments on my site. Over the years I’ve also added blogs to my RSS reader without adding them to the blogroll, usually so that I can decide if I’m going to go read their blogs consistently. By now, the lists barely resemble each other. To make things even more complicated, when I did check out each site today I had to decide whether the person is still blogging or not. It’s amazing how many people seem to feel guilty about quitting their blog and drop in occasionally to say that they’ll begin again shortly. If someone hasn’t posted for a year, it’s pretty easy to drop them from the blogroll. If they published once in July and once in August I begin to question whether they’re really blogging or have deserted blogging for Facebook and Twitter. I was surprised how hard it was for me to delete bloggers I’ve been reading and enjoying for four or five years. In the end, I compromised and deleted them from the blogroll but kept them on my RSS reader. That way if they start publishing again I’ll be able to add them back.

Somewhere in the middle of all this I’ve been fighting problems that have emerged since upgrading to Lion and Aperture, and apparently I’m not the only one having problems with the two not interacting nicely. I’m still not sure if I’ve got the problem solved and I probably won’t publish my latest Rainier pictures, except those in the header, until I’ve solved the problem.

Notice anything unusual? I’ve been working behind the scenes today trying to change a few things around here.

Most important of all, I finally updated to the latest version of WordPress, without a single problem.

That inspired me to change themes, something I’ve wanted to do for quite a while but just haven’t felt I wanted to mess around with the site’s CSS style sheet, something I have to do to ensure that material I’ve quoted is set off properly and doesn’t look like something I’ve written.

Things will probably look a little different every day around here for a while. Although I’ve already managed to change the code that I felt I had to change before I could even change themes, there’s a lot more code that I want to change to make this theme feel more like my own.

First, I want to change the photo at the top of the page, but that will entail finding shots that fit that format, which might not be that easy to do.

Then I want to change the background color and the color of the links, and then fine tune the other fonts. I’m heading to Mt. Rainier tomorrow and Vancouver one day next week, so don’t expect miracles overnight, but hopefully you’ll like the new look and find some of the changes make it more enjoyable to read this site.