[Site Announcements]
01 Jan 2008
Posted by Martin [Tags: Wordpress]
First off, a Happy New Year to you all and best wishes for the twelve months ahead. For reasons I won’t bore you with, 2007 kinda sucked for me so I’ll greet the Hatsuhinode (I hope to hell I spelt that right) with something that lies between cheery optimism and “I hope that shit won’t happen again.” As always, I can’t resist playing around with the blog a bit, and I’ll be making up my mind as to what to watch in the coming season too. One fun little detail that I spotted recently was how this blog is, according to Google, the manliest site on the entire Internet. Go me.
In accordance with anime blogging etiquette, a random pic of a cute moe girl has to appear somewhere to break the wall of text. Conveying my ‘coffee and a laptop’ enthusiasm this time is the eternally kawaii Mahoro.
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[Site Announcements]
14 Oct 2007
Posted by Martin [Tags: Wordpress]
If there’s one thing that derails a two-week daily blogging frenzy, it’s cross-browser CSS bugs. The reason why it’s taken so long for my WP 2.3 upgrade, apart from the lengthy persuasion that stemmed from a dialogue with Owen over the virtues of tags over nested category lists, is that I wanted a theme that’s compatible with this shiny new Wordpress back end. You’ll probably remember that I was a tad reluctant to change in the first place, but after converting the Reviews Archive and discovering the awesomeness of tags and being assured that the upgrade wouldn’t make the sky fall in, I took the plunge.
I have to say that tags are great, even though I’ve only just realised how handy they are in organising large numbers of posts (this blog is approaching the 300 mark if memory serves). I’ve stripped off all the ‘child’ categories, namely series titles, which has tidied up the category list no end. It keeps the names in one tag cloud too, which I’ll get around to styling properly later. What’s possibly the best thing of all is that the tags can be attached to pretty much any post…it was inevitable really that there are a number of posts tagged ‘Huerrgh!’. Obviously.
So yeah, it’s another Shinkai banner image which may or may not be swapped for…um, another Shinkai screencap probably. I’ve named theme itself, which runs on modified default Kubrik template files with a stylesheet that took me an entire weekend to code, To Here Knows When (sadly I doubt anyone would spot where the name comes from). I could have just modded an existing theme like I did last time but I really wanted something different so I’ve tried to keep the clean ‘freshy’ look but simplify the CSS a bit. There are one or two glitches still, such as the ‘#page’ div that doesn’t extend to the footer despite setting the footer to ‘clear: both’ and the the columns could do with a shadow gif to soften the edges or something but I’m pretty comfortable with how it’s turned out so far.
And yes, it still looks rubbish on IE (compared to FF anyway) and no, I don’t care if you have to scroll sideways when using 800×600. I’m in desparate need of sleep so don’t have the patience for people who won’t dig deep enough for a decent monitor. Expect the usual schedule to resume this week, mind, with some more ‘first impressions’, more Bokurano goodness and my first review for Kurau: Phantom Memory. BTW, thanks to the ABC for opinions and advice in getting this thing back online. You guys rule as always. ^_^ And to answer your question Marmot, this is a Jaffa cake. You obviously haven’t lived.
[6 Comments]
[Site Announcements]
30 Sep 2007
Posted by Martin [Tags: Wordpress]
Some of you may remember that I was having some issues with the new 2.3 version and felt more at ease with the older one. After careful consideration and reading up on database restoring in PHPMyAdmin, I decided to do a reverse-upgrade (downgrade?) back to 2.2. Now, I *think* I was running on 2.2.2 but apparently 2.2.3 had some bug/security fixes so I went for that instead, just to play it safe. The main event today though was that I successfully re-installed my pre-upgrade database - this means that I had to re-post my Paprika review but also lost the two reader comments that went with it. To those who commented on that post, sorry about that. ^_^
The upshot of all this is that my categories plugin works again, my A-Z listings page is fine and the links widget ought to work too. On the downside, I’ll miss that advanced toolbar thing on the Write Post page but it’s a small price to pay really.
Lessons learned? Read around before upgrading. Even though the Beta releases ironed out the bugs, that does not necessarily mean that the new version is *better* for your own blog’s needs. If you want tags, advanced toolbar and the other new advances, 2.3 is the way to go. Otherwise, if you’re comfortable with the version you’re using, don’t change it unless there’s a security or stability issue with it. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Most importantly, whether you’re planning an upgrade or not, BACK UP YOUR DATABASE AND FILES. Don’t think “I’ll never need it.” or “It’s too much time and hassle.” If you have the know-how to do it (if not, detailed instructions are on the Wordpress site) , DO IT. Even if it doesn’t save time and hassle, it will be peace of mind for you. I am so grateful I followed the advice of backing up both the database and files because I woudn’t have been able to put things back how they were otherwise. So, please, please, back up your blog regularly. You might not thank me for making you go to the trouble but if things go wrong you WILL thank yourself.
I hope this is of help to the rest of you WP users. Thanks for reading. 
[7 Comments]
[Site Announcements]
30 Sep 2006
Posted by Martin [Tags: Wordpress]
It’s going to take some more tweaking and suchlike but I’ve succeeded in moving the blog over to Wordpress. This means that the url and RSS feed have both moved so I apologise for any broken links that you’ve stumbled on while trying to read the stuff I’m blogging.
The reason for all this disruption is that, after using software that I coded myself, it proved to be easier to install Wordpress onto my server and use that instead. Every day I’ve logged on in order to delete numerous spambots’ efforts in the comments section, as well as being continually frustrated with the limitations of my own coding skills. There were a number of features I wanted to add to the blog but the time and effort needed to work out how to do them and impliment them just isn’t available to me any more. Since I knew every line of code in the old blog like the back of my hand, the transition to a more sophisticated system was quite a lot of hassle but I’m sure it will be better for me (and you!) in the long run.
Thanks for your patience!
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