Category: Blogging

Tuesday texts to read – 9

ssegraves

Some WordPress headaches

ssegraves

You may have noticed things looking a little different around here. Over the past 3-4 weeks I noticed some serious performance issues with my website and could not pinpoint the root cause. I disabled all of my plugins and caching tools to try and get to the bottom of the problem. There seemed to be some rogue process that was making huge calls to the database and was eventually locking it up, causing the site to timeout. Unfortunately none of the fixes I tried worked and instead I opted to do a backup of text and images and essentially delete the website to start from scratch.

So far I think I have gotten things back to an acceptable state but you will probably see some weird things as I play with the theme and try to clean up old content that is not relevant or valuable. Feel free to let me know if you run into something that is causing problems or doesn’t looking right. You can reach me on Twitter or Threads or Mastodon.

Prepping for the New Year with a New Look

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In early November I hinted about a possible new look for this site and today I clicked the “update” button and took the plunge with a new design. It is a free design from the folks over at Themehaus and while I am still playing with the colors, I love the overall simplicity of the theme while keeping it easily readable. One of the quirks of the previous design was that the font was small and if you were reading on a large screen, the text became hard to read. Since it seems most people read directly on the site and not via RSS I focused on this as the main thing to change.

Hopefully people find this easier to read on their devices. If you would like to see a different set of fonts (ones maybe you find easier on the eyes), feel free to leave a comment with a suggestion.

A Refresh Coming?

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I sometimes get bored with the look and feel of this site. I think anyone who runs a website often wonders what a new design would do for the traffic or the placement of the content, so I have been playing with new layouts and fonts and so far I haven’t found anything that really makes me go “wow”. But I do believe a new look is needed. For one, I think a new font would help make long form style posts easier to read. There is also something funky with the way this current theme handles images and resizing and I don’t like it. Moving forward I’d like to be able to feature photography and writing both intertwined and on their own in a cleaner fashion, so look for that in the future. Lastly, I like the idea of link posts for things that I may have a few thoughts on but not enough for a full post. It’s something I don’t know that I will implement as I know people have mixed feelings about such posts but it’s being considered.

What are your thoughts? Anything in particular you would like to see visually different here?

The Linked List Conundrum

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I was reading Stephen Hackett’s post on linked lists and it got me thinking. I have been exploring the possibility of mixing my normal, long(er) form posts with shorter linked list posts.

If you do not use RSS to read this site in a feed reader such as Google Reader then the rest of this post may not make much sense to you, but for power users of such tools, I am interested to know what your usage patterns and preferences are.

Let’s take an example from Shawn Blanc’s feed. The part circled in red is the title for the post as well as a link to the source of information. To reach Shawn’s actual post, you must click the “Permalink” link at the bottom of the post.

The other way of doing this is to have the link circled in red link directly back to Shawn’s post and have the outgoing link to the source inside of that post. I am partial to the latter option but a lot of sites are moving to the style that Shawn (and places like Daring Fireball) use. I agree with Stephen that the latter method, linking back to your own article, is not double-dipping, especially if a link to the source is within the article. Some writers go as far as to mark a link as outgoing.

What do you think? What makes more sense when reading posts? I am thinking I will stay with my current format, but maybe in the near future trying the linked list method.

Some Renovations Coming

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Asphalt Paver

You may not have noticed but the site went down for around 20 minutes today as I did some much needed maintenance to the behind the scenes workings. Seven years of writing slowly starts piling up and a housecleaning needed to take place.

There was a tad bit of data loss due to me forgetting to back a particular folder up. It appears it was only a few pictures and I think I have a backup somewhere, so it may not be an issue anyway.

Over the next few weeks I am hoping to split out my blogging into more compartmentalized areas, with my photography having its own place. That’s not to say that no photography will be posted here, I just want a place where I can showcase it and have it easily referenced.

My other plan is to play with the visual styles a little and maybe incorporate “link” posts, or posts that simply contain a link to something I find interesting. I am still going through the details in my head and have yet to finalize anything. I would actually really appreciate any thoughts my readers have. A comment here or a simple e-mail through the contact form would be awesome.

SitePoint Podcast at BlogWorld & New Media Expo 2010

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Yep, you are reading that right, this year all four hosts of the SitePoint Podcast will be together in the same room for the first time. Patrick O’Keefe, Brad Williams, Kevin Yank, and myself are all headed to BlogWorld & New Media Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada where we’ll hang out with listeners (and non-listeners) and will also record and live broadcast a few shows. This is actually the first time we’ll meet in person since Kevin lives, works, and records the show from Melbourne, Australia.

There are also some other exciting things being planned for the conference which I can’t go into just yet. But be sure and check here and the SitePoint Podcast page for more details. If you are going to be at BlogWorld Expo this year, be sure and stop by, say hello, and stay for a chat.

Kill Off Comments?

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After my recent post on boycotting BP I received a deluge of comments. Some were well thought out and others were typical troll style postings. The comments got me thinking about turning the feature off though, and oddly enough, there was a big discussion about comments starting at the same time.

It seems that Gruber’s thinking is along the lines of what I had in mind; If you are going to respond to something that someone writes, you should be able to do it in long form instead of short quips after a post. How many times do people go back to a comment they wrote on a blog to see if there has been a reply? Does commenting really generate discussion or allow trolls to interject themselves into worthwhile postings on the internet?

What say you? I am going to leave comments open for this post to see what people think, but in the future, they will probably be turned off.