Some WordPress headaches

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.

A Refresh Coming?

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?