I updated PHP on my website and it broke a few things, primarily the search and sidebar widgets. Sorry about that. Anyone got any theme recommendations? In 2017, I made some modifications to “Responsive II” from Cyberchimps.com, but it’s not agreeing with PHP 8 now.
When you can't find it on Google
WordPress
Spring cleaning a website
I’ve spent some time studying Zepfanman.com reports from Google Analytics, a tool I’ve been using for the past year. Without redesigning the site, I’ve taken cues from the reports to update some old posts and make the site load a little faster. You might call it spring cleaning. With less than 900 views a month, I don’t really need to fine tune the site, but hopefully some of you with your own websites will find a helpful nugget or two here.
Full featured commenting with Disqus
More site upgrades for Zepfanman.com (on top of the ones I did during the holidays). I’m trying to maintain the K.I.S.S. mentality, but the Disqus commenting system looked way too handy to pass up. Implemented it this evening. Check it out at the bottom of this post. The biggest selling points were Facebook Connect login, sync between Disqus & WordPress at the same time, and “Social Media Reactions”. I’m still tweaking it a little, so let me know if anything broke. Thanks to WebDesigners’Edge for their recent post on Disqus.
Working on some site improvements
I’ve been up to a little site maintenance. I finally got a license in the footer, but I’m still trying to figure out the best way to back up my FriendFeed in the right column. I’m also trying to tweak my site feed so that the “Read the rest of this entry” cut-off shows up instead of the annoying 50-word automatic cut-off or full post.
Upgrading to 2.8.4
Sorry for the boring post, but wanted to alert about site outage this morning. Like my first upgrade in June, I still can’t use the “Upgrade Automatically” option, so the site will be down again for about an hour while I set up the latest version of WordPress 2.8.4.
I’ve had a slew of issues that just keep getting worse, so if you’ve had problems commenting on the site or getting to certain pages, cross your fingers that this will fix it! Gonna try to do it right now, 10:30 and should be done by 11am EST. See twitter.com/zepfanman for status updates.
<UPDATE>Didn’t take but 20 minutes. While I still have some problems with my dashboard, I think everything for you users should be working dandy!</UPDATE>
Upgrading to 2.8 today
The “Upgrade Automatically” button isn’t getting any further than “Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.8.zip,” so I’m performing my first WordPress update today, the long way. Hopefully won’t be down long, say 11:30am-12:30pm CST.
Also plan on helping out my friend, Natty, this afternoon. He currently has his site on WordPress.com which has half the functionality as WordPress.org (the self-hosted content management system that I use for this site, as well).
Naked Empire Bouffon Company was founded in 2009 by Nathaniel Justiniano and combines social activism with grotesque satire in original, actor-created bouffon performances for the stage and street.
Wish us luck!
UPDATE (12:30): The Zepfanman.com upgrade seems to have gone pretty smoothly, although it doesn’t look like my Dashboard is displaying all the info panels. Gonna see if I can get a nice tag cloud to display on the right column of the site while I’m doing administrative stuff…
UPDATE (1:45): Dashboard still not displaying properly (will figure that out later), but got all my right column widgets working. Seems like a great new upgrade! Here’s the official WordPress Blog announcement and video.