As far as development is concerned, I’ve pretty much left the blog site alone for about 6 months now. It got to the point where it was easy enough to post on a regular basis, upload images and so on. I was stirred from this apathy by the attempt to upgrade Wordpress.
Losing Data
Nothing is certain, except for system failures and upgrades..
I did everything by the book, taking back-ups and trying out the upgrade on a test version before actually upgrading. I was upgrading past 3 versions so I had no illusions that there might be problems. I encountered several on the test run, including the unwelcome fact that the random quotes capability went on the fritz with the new version. The Next Gen image gallery had also changed considerably - it had improved, admittedly, but it wasn’t kind to the way I had been managing images. I found a different random quotes plug-in and changed the style-sheet to accommodate it. It took a good deal of time.
When I chose to go live I used the Wordpress automatic upgrade plugin, recommended to me on Twitter and it made the job painless. I was out of action for 5 minutes only. All you have to do is make sure that all the Wordpress plug-ins are working, then go live. The only one that gave me problems was the Next Gen image library.
Then a couple of hours later the web site went out due to some memory glitch (so says my ISP). When it came back I’d lost a third of my image files - a fact it took me a day to discover. Some directories containing images had simply gone missing. How does that happen? I have no idea and I’m too busy to hold an inquest.
What it meant was that about 10% of the web site had pages with missing images. Damn!
I had them backed up, of course, but not in a convenient form. I started to put them back one-by-one (there are about 100) when I discovered that in combination, the latest version of Wordpress and the Next Gen Library were not behaving as I expected. It has taken me two days to find out how to make them do what I want, and as a consequence I’m reclassifying all images and rebuilding the image library.
SEO
As I decided I was changing the site, I decided I would add more plugins and start taking Search Engine Optimisation) SEO seriously. I haven’t cared much as the blog traffic has been rising month on month. Right now it’s at about 600 pages reads per day except at weekends, where it drops to 300. That’s one third of where I want it to be.
The current version of Wordpress has much improved SEO capabilities so I’m now refreshing the site in two ways:
- Rebuilding the image library
- Adding SEO
And now that I’m doing this I’m considering how to drive revenue for the site. The goal is simple, If I can get sufficient traffic I’ll make this my primary reserch outlet and the It research will be mostly for free or very inexpensive.
Those are problems that I still have to solve, but I’ll keep you informed as I go.
“If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” is a motto I’ve lived by in IT, but it conflicts with another IT truth: “nothing is certain, except for system failures and upgrades.”
An Apology
I apologize to anyone who visited the site and found that images were missing. In particular I apologize to readers of the What is Virtualization article which was read about 200 times without the image showing. I couldn’t really be more embarassed. I sat there trying to make sense of the article without the diagram and realized that, had I been a reader, I would have felt frustrated. Sorry.
