WordPress

Happy New Year, everyone! 2008 started quietly for Wendy & me. We attended a party at our friend Tracy’s house to ring in the new year with our closest friends. Then, for the next couple days, we laid low hanging around the house and enjoying two solid days of downtime. To give some small idea just how low we laid, we watched 5 movies… In one day!

During our downtime, I took the opportunity to upgrade this WordPress installation from version 2.2.3 to version 2.3.2. The upgrade went fairly smoothly, but there were some problems in our existing theme (Ngatini) which required me to use a different theme (Tarski). I am not sure if this is a temporary theme or if we’ll be sticking to it… Tarksi is a modern, good-looking, and well-supported WordPress theme.

I am in the process of tweaking the theme a bit to maximize its usefulness and integration into our site, so some things may not be working as expected yet. They should be fixed in the next several days.

After thinking about it for far too long, this morning I spent some time upgrading my WordPress installation to 2.1.3, the most current version. I had to update a bunch of plugins to their most current version and then deactivate them one-by-one, install the new WordPress files, then re-activate (one-by-one — WordPress REALLY needs a batch plugin scheme!) them and tweak out the system. Everything seems to be working, but if you spot any weirdness, please let me know.

This article is an interesting look at why publishing an article in WordPress sometimes takes a long time.

Thanks to site visitor Robby for pointing out a simple fix that improved the left-side menu presentation!

Thanks to my buddy Doug, we’re now running a nifty ‘quote of the day’ plugin at the bottom of each page. It’s called COI-QUOTES, and you can get at it by clicking here.

After running Xaraya for a few years, it was clear that the goals of Xaraya were no longer consistent with my goals in running this site.

I entered an extended process of evaluating new content management software (CMS) packages and decided to run the exceptional WordPress. Thanks to Doug Daulton for forcefully pushing me toward WordPress! Thanks also to the gang in the WordPress chat room who were extremely helpful during my data migration.

Today, May 24 2005, we roll out the new DrewVogel.COM.

There are certainly some areas that are rough (including the display of Categories over there to the left — I don’t like the way the numbers (which tell you how many articles are in that Category) aren’t on the same line as the Category name), but overall, everything is here!

Please let me know if you spot anything that doesn’t work. There are certainly going to be some issues; some articles used some of the features that were unique to the previous software we ran. Until I can do an audit to locate & fix those, there may be dead links, non-working graphics, and other strangeness. Your assistance is requested… Anything that doesn’t look right to you, draw it to my attention so I can fix it.

Thanks, enjoy, and let me know what you think!