Wednesday, March 03, 2010

Wed
3
Mar
2010

Starting to Purge

One of my goals of 2010 was to purge the house of unnecessary stuff. Well, it occurred to me (while I was sick with Pneumonia) that more than my house is cluttered. I need to start purging my whole life.

One reason I don't blog very much anymore is I've got too much on my mind and no clear outlet to get it out of there and into writing. I currently have 8 blogs set up at the moment (for various purposes). I rarely write on any of them. When I do have something I want to post, where do I put it? Sometimes I want to share to more than one audience, but I don't want the hassle of writing it more than once. More often than not, I'd just decide to throw a quick blurb out on Twitter or Facebook or not to bother writing at all. The problem with this scenario is that my blog is no longer a chronicle of my life. Many times I've referenced this place to pin down a date when some life event occurred. Lately, I've been finding that I never wrote about many important things. Have you tried going back through a Twitter or Facebook account to find specific information? Big old pain in the butt!

Most of the blogs are using Wordpress as the CMS and I'm truly finding it to be a pain. It's like the Microsoft of the blog publishing world. So many people use it that it is the target for hackers and evil-doers. A couple of my oldest blogs had been infiltrated by spammers. I try to keep the software up to date on my personal improvement and craft blogs, but it gets to be so tiresome to have to update all the freakin' time. Then I'd have to keep working with the themes because sometimes the updates broke my theme's functionality. Then I found out from Marcus that my Wordpress blogs put strain on our webserver. One time he even took all of my WP blogs offline because some errant code in a theme was crashing the server. All of these problems aren't really worth being able to use some of the cool plug-ins that drew me to using Wordpress in the first place.

I decided a couple of days ago that I'm over having all these useless blogs. I started researching how to get the content I wanted to save from these WP blogs into this one (which has always been using EE). These are the best instructions I found for importing from Wordpress to Expression Engine. Last night I decided to go for it. I edited the final text files to fix image links and delete extra crap or duplicate posts that I didn't want to import. Except for a little wonkiness with the categories, everything seemed to come over just fine. I do have one blog left still using Wordpress (my 101 in 1001 blog) and I'm hoping that after my days off next week, that one will be migrated over, too. Now I can concentrate on this blog. Without being mentally overwhelmed, I can concentrate on fixing this design and begin posting on a regular basis. Maybe I'll even get some of my coding skills back. When Marcus gets home, I'm going to ask him to delete some database tables. A couple of domains will be let go when they come up for renewal.

The purging has begun.

Sunday, July 01, 2007

Sun
1
Jul
2007

Lame Wordpress Templates

I give up. I've spent a good couple of weeks trying to tweak this theme I picked for my craft blog and I'm starting over. I'm going to take the time and learn to build a good theme from scratch and stop wasting time trying to fix something that has so many problems. That's the problem I've found with most Wordpress themes out there — the person making it only has the most rudimentary understanding of css, html, wordpress tags, etc. and he/she pieces together something and it kind of works. The problem comes in when someone like me tries to add stuff and their jacked up code causes me all sorts of frustrations. Especially when the theme says it is 2.0 compliant, yet I find deprecated tags in there. Grrr. Oh, well. It has been a great learning experience. So, it will still be a bit before it goes live. Sorry.

The good news is I finally had some inspiration for a theme for this site last Friday at work. I've been working on that and hopefully I'll have it ready to go by next weekend. I really didin't want to have my "Pink for October" theme in place when I do the Blogathon at the end of the month. Ooh, that reminds me that today is July 1st and registrations were supposed to open up for it. Watch the blog here for news about that soon and when you can start pledging support for me. Mark you calendars that the event is Saturday, July 28th.
Edit: Registrations not yet open, but they will be soon. I'm so excited I can't stand it!