Rainy Day Blog Overhaul

As far as Saturdays go, today has been great. The past several Saturdays have been packed with yard work, errands, and soccer games. It’s been very rainy and tornado’y the past few days, so today there was no soccer game or yard work. It’s the kind of day you can sit around the house, watching cartoons, drinking coffee, and tinkering on the Web while feeling no guilt. Usually on bright sunny days there’s pressure, both implied and actual, to be outside and active. That’s well and good, but sometimes… But sometimes you need some quality time with your blog.

Today was the day that I upgraded from WordPress 2.2 to Wordpress 2.5.1. It’s been on the to-do list for a few weeks now, but today was just the day to get it done. It was a snap with the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plug-in. It’s not that the process is difficult or time-consuming, I just figured in the spirit of the lazy Saturday I’d give it a try.

It worked very well. Before the install I had to temporarily loosen up file permissions and after the install I had to manually activate my plug-ins, but otherwise it was great. A few clicks through a Web-based wizard and JSB was upgraded! Of course, being the paranoid type I manually made backups of my document root and database, but even still I think it saved some time.

I also took the opportunity to switch up my theme. My previous theme, a lightly modified 3-column K2, lasted for quite a while (a decade in blog years). But alas, it started to bug me. So after downloading a dozen or so themes, I came across the current theme - Hemingway by Kyle Neath. I like it a lot, Kyle did a nice job. I’ll be sending him a thank you email and will contribute a few Mountain Dews to his development effort. The theme is very well done.

You might be thinking: “Jay, if you’re a Web guy, why not roll your own theme?” Good question. The fact is, I have. I have invested dozens (likely hundreds) of hours working on my personal website over the past several years. The last version, and now this version, of my site I’ve used other’s templates as the foundation for my site design to save on time. I’ve got other web projects that I’m working on (for myself and others) and my schedule doesn’t afford me the opportunity to endlessly fret over my blog’s design. Which, if you know me, you know that is exactly what I do!

I’m sure I’ll make a few updates and changes as time permits, and in fact I’ve made a couple minor ones already, but for now this will do just fine.