So be ready for me to break it. Nothing major, just upgrading to Thesis 1.7.

Good news and bad news…

The upgrade is done. It’s not a whole lot of good news, but, hey… it’s done, dangit! The bad news is that it looks like my user database didn’t export along with everything else. I’ll try to find a solution for it, but you may need to re-register. This may well mean that I inadvertantly nuked all my feeds as well, which also sucks.

There also seems to be a bunch of functionality that got lost in the transfer (like the different pages/sections of the blog – About Me, About This Site, etc), so I’ll need to figure all that out as time goes on, too. And aesthetically there are some things which need to be addressed that are a result of Thesis upgrading their tab functionality. Maybe I’ll just slowly work on a site redesign.

Boy, it sure would have been nice to know all this back in December *cough*worthlesscsagents*cough* when I had over a month between semesters to work on it!

The majority of the redesign work has been completed through the use of the Thesis WordPress Theme, which I am still getting comfortable with and will write about later when I have gotten a bit deeper into all the options it affords. Suffice it to say for now that I love not only the theme, but the support that the community offers pseudo web designers like me.

There’s still a bunch of changes that I want to make, but for now, this is it. The overall style has remained the same, and the goal now is to streamline and focus on usability and content. Most alterations will be subtle, with only a few drastic design changes (such as the currently gawd-awful footer) in the pipeline.

Feel free to offer up suggestions, especially if there’s something I have done (or haven’t done for that matter) that really annoys you. Unless, of course, you are using IE6. If that’s the case, then there’s little I can do for you. It’s bad enough trying to maintain compatibility for modern browsers. IE6 is… what… 8 years old now? Do yourself a favor and go upgrade. Personally, I recommend Mozilla’s Firefox, but I also have friends who are enamored with Google’s Chrome. Anything other than IE and you’re a winner in my book.

Updating to the latest release of WordPress. If the site goes all wonky, that’s why (last time I broke it completely, so keep various appendages crossed).

I still have a site re-design planned, as well, but first things first. Unless I the new version of WP has broken something in this theme, it’ll be 2 months or so before I have a new design up and running.

UPDATE:

Well that was quick and painless. And what’s even better is that it looks like things are ok with the theme. Since that is the case, the redesign will proceed at a leisurely clip.

Taking a break from grading and updating the site. If it disappears for a moment or three, I probably blew it up. But I am backing it up, so it won’t be gone forever. Hooray for WP-DBManager!

edit: ok that was frighteningly simple… I wonder what I screwed up that I can’t see. Guess we’ll find out! I’ll need to start spending some more time exploring all the new stuff with WP 2.5. It looks a whole lot more fun and easy to use that it was before. There are also a bunch more things for me to figure out how to use. One of these days I’ll have the time to really get into it, but today is not one of those days.

Just a quick update on the plans I have for the website. Mostly I have been working on backend and design stuff the past couple of weeks which has, by and large, now been completed. On to the content!

The first major addition will be the return of the online photo album. I am likely going to be switching over to Coppermine, as I grew extremely tired of wrestling with Gallery. Hopefully it will prove to be less of a hassle.

Once that has been installed and populated, I’ll be working on returning the PMHS pages to new found glory for the Class of ’85 (Go Vikings!). Even though I now work for a rival HS here in town, I’ll do my best to remain unbiased in the presentation.

Lastly, I want to try and find some sort of monitoring/statistical package I can install on the site. My web host has one built in, but I need to upgrade packages to use it and right now I don’t want to do that. Anyone have any suggestions? By the way, one of these days I am going to put a call out to de-lurk and register, especially if you subscribe to the RSS feed. I have no idea if anyone besides Sangi and Nick even visit me here in my little corner of the web.

Realistically, that right there should take me the rest of the year, unless I am seriously misjudging the lack of free time I am going to be having between work and grad school. I have plans beyond those 2 projects as well, but things change so fast with technology I won’t even bother announcing them until I am about to push them live, sometime next spring.

So hang in there. Lots more stuff coming down the pike, and I’ll still be posting during the school year as well.

(originally posted July 9, 2007 – Updates at the end)

Things are going just swimmingly with the new website design. I hope to be able to have at least the new template up within the next week, maybe two weeks at the outside. I found a couple free templates I like and am busy ripping apart the CSS and combining elements from each that I like into a single template. Even when I get a version up here, it won’t be anywhere near finished, but it wont be a hideous eyesore, either, like this one is (yes, I hate this one a little more every day).

Unfortunately, I can only spare a couple hours a day to work on it. School has started back up (summer session) and between that and the writing and just, well, life in general, I have every day planned out to the minute.

Speaking of which, let me introduce you to a handy little application I found. It’s freeware called TimeTo and can be found at http://www.davidberman.com/software/timeto.php. I have only been using it a week or so, but already I am really liking it. I have used several time management type software solutions in the past, and they were each either way more than I needed or way too simplistic. In the end I reverted to a regular old Excel Spreadsheet with some custom VB scripting. It was a little unwieldy, but since I built it, I knew it’s quirks and worked around them easily enough.

Happily, after about a week of use, I haven’t given up on TimeTo and am actually beginning to get more complex with a few of it’s capabilities. I will not even try to extol its virtues or decry it’s shortcomings, as I just don’t know the product well enough yet. I will say, however, that just by using it for a week, I have become solidly aware of problems I had with my old system, and so far any concern I had has been happily cast aside.

TimeTo is, for now at least, a perfect solution for me. That may change come fall semester when things start going crazy again, but for now I am enjoying a new system and actually finding ways to gain myself an hour or so of free time a day. If you are someone that is easily distracted or just never seems to get to the bottom of your To Do list, you might want to give it a try. I did, and so far I don’t regret it a bit.

**Update**

2 weeks left in the semester, so work on the site has been sparse as I prepare my final paper and presentation. It will pick up again soon.

TimeTo is still working well. It will be interesting to see how it works with the daily details of employment when that kicks in next week. The more I use it, the more I like it, and I think I am ignoring all the big-time “power-user” options. Hopefully I’ll figure out some of those during the 2 week hiatus between semesters.

This just in from the “No Kidding, Really?” Department, the new template is live. I am still configuring things so it isn’t fully implemented yet, but I’ll likely begin re-posting entries shortly.

Feel free to leave site-related comments here, especially if you find something broken I haven’t caught.