Category: Blog Notes

I finally got all the old entries posted (I hope) from back in 2006-07. Thusly and therefore, if you want to read some “new” material over the next couple hours/days/weeks, flashing back to that period of time will be a good place to look. (Some of them may have dead links—they try to send you to websites that no longer exist—but I didn’t want to mess with the original material too much.)

Alas, my work is not done. I’m trying to trim down the list of categories, then add tags to a bunch of the entries so it’s easier to find specific things (e.g., labeling Beauty and the Geek entries by season instead of just keeping them clumped together). It feels like I’m making good progress, so I’m hoping I’ll have good results when I’m done, too.

I’m making more changes beyond playing with the theme this time around. For starters, I’m finally reposting the entries from Feb ’06 to Feb ’07. I saved them all onto my computer when I first wrote them on shawnbakken.com, but for some reason, I didn’t get that entire year’s worth of material on here.

Second, I’m going to play with the categories a little and add some tags to make it easier to surf through entries to find various topics. Even I don’t know the different kinds of posts that are in the Blatherings category and I’m the one who made it.

That may be the extent of the changes, but getting it all finished could take a while. Thankfully, I’m between classes at Augsburg, so it won’t be interfering with classwork. I’ve got the next couple days free to use at my discretion and this stuff has been on my plate for a while. Hope you enjoy the final result when it’s finished. (I hope I do, too.)

I just installed a Twitter-based plugin that’ll send out a tweet every time I make a new blog entry on here. I fiddled with the options a little—I’m smart enough not to mess with coding anymore—and I’m wondering what the new tweets will look like. It’ll even show over on the right sidebar of the blog in the Twitter feed… who knows, maybe that’ll just fill up with a list of “Hey, look at this blog post!” Whether it does or not, it’s time to satisfy my curiosity and then fiddle with any options that need refiddling.

A few days ago, the blog croaked. The reason? Me. But it was for a good cause, I swear!

Before said croakage, this sucker was ancient. WordPress has advanced to 3.0.5 (don’t ask how they figure out the decimals, ’cause I haven’t the slightest idea). Meanwhile, shawnbakken.net was somewhere in the early 2s. I thought that maybe because I wasn’t hosting the site, I didn’t have the administrative power to make the upgrade. I was wrong.

The problem was that the site was using an old web server. The person who is hosting this website switched web servers, which has much better customer service and has been much more effective overall. (I’ll get back to that in a minute.) Their instructions were to go to the site where I registered my blog, change the old web server information so it would connect to the new server, then wait until the new people upgraded the blog. It sounds complicated on paper… or on a computer screen, for that matter… but once I figured out where to go and which changes to make, it seemed fairly simple.

A few hours later, I went to look at the “Administrative Dashboard” and found a new login screen. I typed in my name and password to discover a whole type of dashboard: the type that you find on WordPress 3.0.5. Hell yeah…

As you may have noticed, the blog’s background and a bunch of other aesthetic things have changed with this new upgrade. Part of it is to make it all look prettier, although I’d like to find a picture of myself that I could use for the header instead of flowers or something (because I’m vain like that). Another part of it is because this background allows the use of “widgets”, which is how I added my Twitter feed to the right column of the screen. The old background didn’t have that option, but that didn’t stop me from trying to add them.

I surfed around WordPress’s help section and found something that referred to adding widgets to a site. It had instructions for adding a few lines of programming text to the “sidebar” and the “theme editor”. Assuming those changes worked, I could add some nifty new toys to the blog. As it turned out, the changes didn’t work. Or perhaps they would have worked if I’d done them correctly.

I copied and pasted all of the text from both pages into a Word file so I could undo the changes easily. However, that doesn’t do much good when you accidentally get rid of a line of programming from the theme editor and everything stops working. And I mean everything.

I couldn’t edit anything, I couldn’t get back to the Dashboard, I couldn’t even look at the blog. Whenever I tried, a notice came up about an error in the theme editor in line 3 (where I was making changes). It might as well have been a flashing neon sign on the screen saying, “Nice work, dumbass!” Honest to God, I had trouble getting to sleep last night because of it.

Thankfully, I got a message out to the Powers That Be (a.k.a., the new web server people who are much more awesome than the last ones) and they fixed the problem by the time I logged in today. *victory dance*

So the blog is back online for people to read and now has all sorts of little unnecessary toys that may never be used, but I thought they were neat. It shows the last five Twitter posts I made, you can “like” individual posts on Facebook, share the posts using different programs… there are some statistical toys that I can use on the Dashboard, too. Yay, toys!

So I spent a lot of time downloading and upgrading and playing with stuff this afternoon, but one thing I’m not going to do is mess with the editing tools. After all, if I screw up and the blog stops working again, how am I supposed to put a picture of myself up in the header?