Blogging about blogging
Happy WordPress Anniversary?!
I’ve been doing something akin to ‘blogging’ on the Internet for quite a few years. I don’t have an exact date that I started and the definition of ‘blogging’ is kind of tenuous. But my notes indicate that I began sharing my thoughts and opinions on the web sometime around 1998 or 1999.
Every once in a while, though, I get some reminder of the durability of this strange pastime of mine. Today I noticed I had an ‘achievement’ from WordPress in my notifications that got me thinking.
Planned outage: Saturday, February 15
I will be bringing brought down my blog server on Saturday to re-organize my server rack in order to fit in a new rack-mounted UPS.
I am not setting a specific time, but hopefully no more than two or three hours sometime in the afternoon. I’ll update this post when the outage is complete. The outage started at 1:00 PM pacific time and completed at approximately 1:50 PM. More details can be found in the rest of this post.
So much for 99% uptime…
The little server in my basement that runs all my blogs has been down since February 8th. I finally got it back up and running today and, after correcting a few hiccups, the blogs are back up as of February 12th at 10:15 PM Pacific.
What went wrong? And why did it take so long to repair? Well… that’s a bit of an interesting story, but only if you are technically minded. The short, non-technical answer: there was a problem with the storage, and I fixed it by replacing the failing part.
Read on for the longer and more complicated answer…
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Making the OceanWP theme behave
I recently updated this site with a new theme and a few other changes. I had a few struggles understanding how the basics work, and since then have been working on some fine-tuning. It has been somewhere between frustrating and fun, but I feel like I understand a bit better now how to get the OceanWP theme to do the things I want it to.
It is all done via magic… er, no, actually it is done via CSS. And a lot of help from the OceanWP support folks: being able to get prompt support makes paying for the theme seem a bit less painful at least.
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Missing Sidebars – Vexed by responsive design
I mentioned in my post earlier today that I thought my updates to this site had rendered it incompatible with Safari by failing to display the left and right sidebars in the main blog list navigation. I’ve done some further testing and found that I was completely wrong.
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Site design refresh ‘completed’
I’ve completed the site theme update as I mentioned yesterday. It isn’t completely finished: some things are still broken (sorry, macOS Safari users), and I’m not happy yet with some elements of the appearance.
But I did accomplish the main objectives I had. Ubergeek Kelly’s World is now using a more ‘modern’ theme that works with the plugins that were causing problems with the Twenty Fourteen theme I was using previously. And as part of the change I implemented the permalinks change (wth redirects from the old structure) I wanted to make. There are some additional details below for the ‘tech-curious’.
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Incoming site design changes…
The Ubergeek Kelly’s Blog theme (the code that controls the basic layout and design) is getting a bit long in the tooth. Mostly this boils down to the WordPress theme I’m using (Twenty fourteen, one of the WordPress ‘bundled’ themes) being a decade old.
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Gaming content on the move…
For twenty years I had this singular blog: the one you are looking at right now, Ubergeek Kelly’s World. It definitely has served its purpose as a brain-dump blog of all the things that interest me.
But for years I have felt that some topics on the blog just didn’t ‘fit’, and this posed some challenges. I began my plan to address these challenges when I split out my motorcycle related content earlier this year to a new blog: Geek on a Harley. Now I’m beginning the second stage of my changes by moving my gaming related content to a new location: Words of the AgingGamer (https://www.aginggamer.net).
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You can like this post!
No one has liked any of my posts or comments in months. Actually, that isn’t really true- the actual truth is that a small number of people who visit my site without using a browser have liked some of my posts. Nope, that still isn’t completely true: people may like my posts, but they can’t push a button recording the idea that they like them.
That’s a long-winded way of saying that the ‘like’ button that is supposed to appear on posts and comments has been broken. So badly broken, in fact, that I turned the feature off. Well, you can now rejoice! The Like button is back (although as always you need to log in…), and boy is that a story…
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