WordPress upgrade mildly broken

Bits keep falling off this blog like so many bits of newspaper escaping from the recycling van cage. (E.g. the Atheist blogroll became landfill months ago, although I see it still works fine on dozens of sites.)

After bowing to WordPress’s nagging requests and upgrading WordPress to version x (I can’t remember) two days ago, I find that I can’t attach tags to posts.

Any ideas?

End of all spare time

Despite a bit of jet lag, I am now back and all settled in at home again. I had planned to return to blogging with new found gusto – and given the amount of drivel floating around in the UK at the moment there is a LOT for me to whine and rant about.

However, we now have a Nintendo Wii in the house. After a long time in which I have avoided all contact with any of the latest gaming machines (for me Civilization 4 on the PC was the pinnacle of all computer gaming), I cracked and we took ownership of a Wii and Sports Pack.

This was a mistake.

I am now a full blown addict to the bowling game and the competitive streak in me has turned this “game” into an almost full time obsession. In the few minutes I have sat here typing, I am fuming that other people are bowling and stopping me get the much needed practice that will take me to 300 points. I curse my family members (silently) when they are on it, because they are taking time away I could be using it. Then there is the boxing. Despite getting battered by every fourth or fifth opponent, I acutally like this. I get carried away with it enough that after each round my arms ache, I am covered in sweat and anything fragile within about 3m has been destroyed.

Hopefully this is just a passing fad, the magic of new technology, and I will soon get bored with it all. If so, expect a return to blogging. If not…

WordPress Upgrade

For the techies amongst you, WP 2.6 is now on the streets. (and has been for over a week – but I’ve been away). The promo video is:

https://videopress.com/v/mARhRBcT/fmt_std

When I get back to my proper PC, real content will be blogged once more.

Upgrade Stalled

It looks like not enough people made the correct devotions to Hermes and now we are not going to try and upgrade the blog this weekend. Heather has been sidelined by a cold and a fair amount of work and my internet access time is approaching the bare minimum. When we have more time we will look at what is required with the upgrade and give it ago. Please, keep making sacrifices to Ukko though.

Upgrade Time

Just to let you know we are planning to upgrade to WordPress 2.3 over the weekend. As this is likely to change a lot of our plugins (such as Ultimate Tag Warrior), there may be some problems with the site while this happens. Please be patient and pray to Hermes that we get up and running again without any problems.

Downtime

In case the faithful are curious, there will be a bit of a quiet patch here on whydontyou.

I am still offline and heather has taken a few days off. Almost normal service should be resumed around 4 sept. Hopefully my net connection should be back by 6 sept but i wouldn’t hold my breath.

In the meantime, please feel free to comment and link to posts here!

Comments and Emails

As a prelude to the WhyDontYou Comment Week (due to start tomorrow if we have the time πŸ™‚ ), we have taken Michael‘s advice and put in a comment subscription facility. Now, if you find a thread you like here you can post a comment and, if you want to be kept informed of the debate, you can tick the box and get notification of follow ups via email. All good fun. Part of the idea behind us commenting a lot more next week is to help encourage discussions and share opinions via the blogosphere – which, it seems to me, is part of the reason they exist.

Commenting on blogs

Now, we are as guilty of this as anyone else, but looking through the stats it seems that, on average and discounting bots, there is only one comment made out of every 250 page views on this blog. Part of the fun of blogging is getting feedback from others and learning from their ideas an opinions. To try and rectify this, WhyDontYou blog is asking everyone who visits and reads a post to leave a message — even if it is just a “You Suck” comment — and we will do our bit by beginning a “Comment Week” next week, where we will leave a comment on every post we read. Please join in and spread the word.

New Theme Time

New Theme ScreenshotIt has been a quiet weekend here on the blogging front, but we have worked on a new theme – returning to a Stonehenge header picture and blue colour scheme. The site should now look like the screenshot. If it is radically different there is a problem or we have removed the theme πŸ™‚

As always, there may be a few teething problems early on, so we really do appreciate it if you can take a moment to let us know if you encounter any problems. No matter how trivial you may think a problem is, if you tell us, we can try to fix it! One thing we will try to look at is page loading time. Our initial work around for this, is to increase the use of “read more” breaks in the content of posts on this page, but I am aware some people don’t like this, so please take a moment and let me know what you think.

[tags]General,Site Admin, Theme, Whydontyou, Blog[/tags]

Quiet Period

Just to let the faithful readers (both of you) here know, by wonderful coincidence all the authors here will be away on holiday over the period 1 July – 8 July, so it is quite unlikely there will be any posts.

Hopefully we will all come back refreshed, full of philosophical and atheistic vitriol and have loads of photographs to share.

Bet you cant wait… πŸ˜€

[tags]WhyDontYou, Holiday, Site admin, General, Why Dont You[/tags]

WordPress blog themes

Contast WordPress Theme ScreenshotBit off the normal track here, but there is a new theme available from Compuskills which I think is really pretty (although I am biased) and if it wasn’t for the fact I like this theme, we would probably be using it here.

Have a look, let them know what you think (I took the photo they use, in case you are wondering..) and if you think it looks good use it on your own blog. They are willing to modify or create themes to your specifications as well, so if you are looking for an overhaul give them a shout. For non-WP users (you weirdos) they may also be willing to accommodate your system.
[tags]Blog, WordPress, theme, webdesign, compuskills, Site Admin, Blog Software[/tags]

Outage

Sorry about the recent full blown outage we’ve suffered. To be honest, at the moment, I still have no idea what caused it. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

New Page – Blogroll

Just for general site admin / information purposes: we have added a new permanent page to hold the Why Dont You Blogroll. I am going to see how this goes for a while and then, if there are no problems, I will move the blogroll out of the sidebar where it currently lives.

The only hurdle I can see with this is that it may impact on any technorati link ratings. As far as I see it, each time we make a new post, the pages in the blogroll should all have their technorati authority link from us “refreshed” as it were (resetting the 180 count down). Moving them to a new page make cause problems – but as, at the moment, it seems technocrappi is not reading our outbound links properly anyway, it may not matter.

Please, let me know what you think about this.

Slight Misunderstanding

Now, normally, I wouldn’t bat an eyelid at a site taking offence over something which was posted here. Normally though, offence is intended and it actually cheers me up to see the recipient has realised and taken the required offence πŸ™‚

The flip side, and possibly an off shoot of an over-developed Atheistic moral code, is that when no offence was intended, yet some one took offence, I feel the need to say sorry. Bah.

It is in this light, that I should point out that Heathers’ recent post (Technorati Links Mystery) was not written with the aim of offending Parabiodox and it certainly was not meant to be snide about the fact that he was still showing up. Heather responded with a comment, but as I am aware, not all of you read the comments (bad people), so this is what she wrote:

Blast. I must have explained this so badly. I dont dare mention today’s Technorati nonsense…….
(a) Parabiodox took my bracketed (ffs) after his name as “snide” when he referred to it in his blog. Sorry,  Parabiodox, it was supposed to be ironic that we were getting loads of links from a christian and none from the atheist blogroll. (By the way, I wasn’t complaining that Technorati wasn’t indexing our posts. It is. It’s taking links in our text as links)
(b) My issues don’t have to do with getting authority off the Blogroll. It is to do with Technorati not seeing the Blogroll, when it’s in the form of a script. Whether it’s on our site or anybody else’s, Technorati just doesn’t see any links on it and hasn’t for weeks.

This is about as close to apology as I can get, so I hope it clears matters up πŸ˜€ .

[tags]Parabiodox, Site Admin, General, Comments[/tags]

Theme Change

As mentioned previously, the site has undergone another theme change. Hopefully this one should address the problems people had with the older one, and present a nice, pleasant look and feel to the blog.

As with last time, all comments and feedback is more than welcome. Please let us know if you find anything wrong so we can try to fix it!

[tags]blog, Blog Software, Compuskills, Downloads, Site Admin, Technology, Style, Themes, WordPress, Webdesign, Web Design[/tags]