reformat

What Happened This Weekend

I decided that I would do a reformat of my WordPress installation and as part of that reformat, I would install WordPress 2.7 beta 2. I also plan on doing a redesign of the site to make everything much more simpler than before. However, things didn’t go as planned thanks to my webhosting provider, AnHosting a.k.a. MidPhase. Starting on 11/07/2008 4:37 PM I sent in a trouble ticket to MidPhase letting them know that I was experiencing timeout error messages when browsing to my domain. Cpanel, email, anything dealing with my account was loading slower than molasses. I became increasingly upset as I updated the ticket on 11/08/2008 2:20 AM. Ten hours went by without anyone responding to my trouble ticket. This is the first time I’ve had an experience like this with MidPhase and it was pretty frustrating.

Once two more hours went by with no update to my ticket or the situation, I called the support line for MidPhase and because it was so early in the morning, I didn’t have to deal with a queue. After talking with the gentleman and having him confirm the issues I was experiencing, he told me that a support rep has been assigned to my ticket and he would look into it. The rep responded to my ticket on 11/08/2008 4:36: AM.

By the way, I should point out that the entire problem was based around the CPU load on the shared server being to high, not allowing other things to process. It was increasingly frustrating to me because I wouldn’t think zapping whatever processes were hogging up the CPU would be that hard to shut down. What made things worst is that I had deleted my WordPress files along with the database and because I couldn’t access PHPMyAdmin or various other parts of Cpanel let alone getting my site to load, my domain was stuck on a WordPress installation error.

stupidcpu

The last time I updated the ticket was on 11/08/2008 5:26 AM. I basically had enough at this point and just hoped that things would be better after I woke up. Thankfully, things did get back to normal. Then, because my shared server was one of the ones that was recently migrated into a new data center, the file upload limit in the php.ini file was set to 2mb which means I couldn’t upload and import my WordPress WXR file. After going back and forth a few times with support, they managed to get that changed enabling me to have a successful import. The support for this particular issue was much better than the previous one.

So, that is where I stand now. I am currently configuring the plugins I know I am going to use. After that, I plan on working on the theme to get things simplified and straightened out. Special thanks to everyone who contacted me asking me what happened. Obviously, visiting a site that all of a sudden has a hello world post on it with the default Kubrick theme is a cause for concern. I appreciate those who sent me a message expressing their willingness to help if need be. Thank you.

Nothing malicious happened to the site, I just happened to go through with my WordPress reformat which I sometimes do but it turned out to be a series of badly timed events. Hopefully, things are all better now.

What A Busy Week

I am pretty excited to know that I am almost finished with my 32 hour work weeks at the grocery store. At least, for the time being and everything continues to go well with freelancing. The grocery store will serve as a crutch in case things in the freelancing world cave in. This past week, I published an interview on BloggerTalks.com with Steve Hodson, published a great post that was welcomely received by the Performancing community called 7 Tips On Building Relationships Through Blogging, produced a fun open mic edition of Perfcast and to top it all off, produced an hour and a half WordPress Weekly with Jane Wells were we covered a ton of ground related to WordPress 2.7.

WordPress 2.7 Beta 1 is out and ready for the publics consumption. November 10th looks like the date for a release candidate while the end of November is aimed for the actual release of 2.7. I am going to bite the bullet and work on getting my content from my Jeffc.me domain and the content on Jeffro2pt0 back into one file and then import that into a new installation of WordPress, that being 2.7 beta 1. Then, I’m going to work on slimming down the theme and installing one plugin at a time and get back to the basics.

One of the subtle changes I am going to make is to remove the FeedBurner graphic. I was having a discussion with Andrew Rickmann on the WordPress Weekly after show and I was talking to him about going back to the basics and how I am getting to the point of doing things my way instead of the popular (what the rest of the blogosphere is doing) way.  So, I’ll remove the graphic because I don’t care to see it everyday. I’ll check in from time to time but it is not a priority for me anymore. My priority is to clean this place up, highlight my freelancing work and then publish content on a regular basis by treating this blog as if it was my Tumblr account. That means, publishing links to articles that interest me, sometimes I’ll write a long form article, opinionated pieces, bits of my personal life, random thoughts, etc.

I just feel that it is time for me to reclaim this blog as my own and no one else’s. While I enjoy writing content for people, I always enjoy writing content for myself and getting my thoughts from my head, out into the open. I want to get back to the point in time of where I can freely express myself without thinking about the boundaries I have placed on this blog by writing for others.

Will I still talk about WordPress and Web 2.0 and all that other stuff? Of course I will, as I see fit, but don’t expect this site to be an authoritative figure in any subject. I want to converse with people and discuss things, concepts, ideas, whatever. So, that will be the focus of the site after I have reformatted it. Along with the reformat, I plan on doing a redesign but it will not be anything drastic. I’m tired of spending 17 hours each time I redesign the site. I’ve always been a fan of forests and so, that is the theme I am going to head towards with the redesign.

For those that will continue to ride the train of life and blogging with me, its time to move on to the next stop. For everyone else, you can get off here. But don’t forget to send me a postcard :)

WordPress 2.7 Is Cause For A Reformat

This is just a heads up that when WordPress 2.7 is released, I will be reformatting my WordPress installation to get rid of the fluff that may be stored in the database and start off from scratch. I’ll once again audit my use of plugins and only install the ones that I think are necessary. Also, if you haven’t noticed already, I’ve changed the design of the blog a little bit because for starters, adding one more step to the post publishing process in the form of filling out custom fields is a drag. Secondly, I think the reformat as well as the simplified theme will finally help this site load quickly than it has before. Not sure what is causing the slow page loads but I am determined to figure it out.

I’ll also be modifying the theme to take advantage of threaded/paginated comments. I’m pretty stoked about 2.7 as I think many WordPress users out their will be blown away by it.

My Biggest Traffic Boost

Kevin over at BloggingTips.com has asked the audience the following question, what gave you your biggest traffic burst? To start things off, I’d like to say that this blog has had a number of pages submitted to StumbleUpon as well as Digg.com. I know of one instance where a link to this blog was featured on Techememe as I had posted a conflicting post to something that was published on Techcrunch. While each one of these circumstances provided a big boost in traffic, nothing compares to the traffic I received inadvertently via reformatting my blog.

February Stats

The graphic up above is from February of 2008. The numbers within the first column are the days of the month. After importing the content of my blog back into a fresh install of WordPress, this gave each post a new ID number. It also gave RSS feed readers a fit as the new post ID numbers made it seem like I had just published 400 new posts. I don’t know if the resurgence in traffic was due to everyone visiting the site from their feed reader or not. I do know that I witnessed a large amount of traffic from stumbleupon for articles that had already been stumbled some time ago. It was as if someone had resubmitted them. Out of everything that has happened to the blog within almost a year of it’s existence, this reimporting of content is what has generated the most traffic for the blog.

I really don’t recommend this method of getting traffic. I really didn’t think this was going to happen and I ended up posting an apology to all of those who had subscribed to my feed. In fact, if you were to reformat and then re import your content, generating new post id numbers to get traffic numerous times a year, you are definitely gaming the system and in my opinion, doing a dis service to yourself and your RSS subscribers.