Be Happy In Your Updates

Be Happy In Your Updates

It is great when a few things come together all at once especially when all of it was completely unexpected.  I have not been doing much on my blog over the last several months but have recently decided to start getting more involved with it again.  My old theme was not compatible with the latest version of WordPress, so I moved to another theme and made a few changes in my plug-ins.  I was not thrilled with these changes, but it allowed the blog to work.  I started to write a little (and I mean a little.)

This weekend I tried to complete a MySQL upgrade but ran into a glitch.  Luckily for me, my excellent hosting provider, Media Temple, resolve the issue in short order.  This update also corrected a problem I had with one of my favorite plug-ins called “Better Related Posts” by Nicolas Kuttler.  Nicholas is one of my favorite plug-in authors as he is so responsive to his user community.  These two quick wins got me a little more excited about seeing what else I could be update on my blog.

I swung back over and saw that the fine folks at ColorLabs had updated my original theme.  This was a completely unexpected as I thought they considered this a dead theme.  The current update fixed all the glitchy problems I have been fighting with for the last couple of years.  I still look at my blog theme, and I like it as much today as the day I bought it.  Maybe one day in the future I will become bored with this theme and decide to replace it.  Now armed with the update I will not be forced to consider a replacement in the near-term.

Some of a few challenges I still have to work out are the large images that now need to be resized and compressed down based on rolling back to my original theme.  This theme is really the third iteration of my blog, and I have never gone back and corrected the layouts of the prior 200 posts.  Unfortunately, I am not motivated enough to do that even now so I will only correct about the last five posts.  Older posts are going to have to live with the less than optimized layout for this theme.

Cruising through the WordPress plug-ins list, I found JetPack by WordPress and Twitter Widget Pro by Aaron Campbell.  Both plug-ins are excellent, and I consider them great additions to the blog.  The Twitter feed seems to be flaky at best.  I tried four or five different Twitter feed plug-ins before settling in on Twitter Widget Pro.  I would love to see the Twitter plug-ins developers come up with a caching methodology to help reduce the amount of times a messages like “failed to contact Twitter” are displayed to blog visitors.  When you are Twitter and slammed by millions of users per hour, I guess you can understand some of the congestion problems they must experience.

I received a couple good retreats on some of my blog postings and blog traffic is up even considering how much I have neglected it over the last several months.  All good things to report with nothing for me to complain about; how often does that happen?  You really have to appreciate when unexpected good things happen.

One thought on “Be Happy In Your Updates

  1. This blog is still as beautiful as it was. I have always found useful content on this blog and its good that you have decided to post on a regular basis. I have a blog of my own created in wordpress still new here

Leave a Reply