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What happened to the design?

To know more about why styles are disabled on this website visit the

Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information.

Wordpress 2.5 was released last night which I promptly upgraded using the awesome Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin. Upgrade went great with no issues so far. I had been testing the RC’s on a test account for about a week so I was prepared for what was coming. I did have some minor issues with my theme, which makes no sense, but thanks to Rob, he fixed most of the issues. There still is one issue that I think I know what’s causing it but no idea how to fix it. Its small enough that you probably won’t notice it even tho you’re seeing it as you read this. I haven’t decided if I’ll just let it be or remove the CSS code totally. Time will tell.

I’ve also moved from my web host from Dreamhost to Media temple. I did this last week and it went very smoothly mostly due to learning from my last move. I got a lot of questions on why I decided to switch because I never had any issues with Dreamhost. Mostly was because media temple contacted me after a previous post and send me a t-shirt and note thanking me for mentioning them. That is the kinda company I want to give my money too. I’m also a sucker for any company with an iPhone interface. So far I’ve been very happy with the change and my blog does seem a little more snappy when loading.

To segue into the next thing, I was driving to work when I had a awesome idea for a domain name. I broke out the iPhone and loaded up media temple to buy a domain name. Of course, the site was already taken by a cybersquatter. This is the 2nd domain I want that is rotting away due to these cockgobblers. Dammit!

I recently got an invite to Paul Stamatiou’s new startup service Skribit. Skribit in its basic form is a widget that allows blog readers to make suggestions or vote on what topics they would like to see covered. One of my new year’s resolutions was to blog more but I usually only write about stuff that catches my interest. I’ve installed the widget in the sidebar and have added some idea’s I’ve had floating around. My readers, thats you guys, can either vote on what you would like to see or even better, make your own suggestions. I have a decent readership but I’m not sure its big enough for Skribit to work for me. I’m going to leave the widget up for a few months and see how it works out.

I’ve been tweaking the site for the past few weeks with some small but noticeable changes.

1. I finally fix the nasty IE6 CSS bug that was causing the sidebar to be pushed all the way to the bottom.
2. Since my Project 365 is over, the photos in the sidebar will now reflect my current photostream from Flickr.
3. Thanks to a suggestion by Rick over at Bent Corner, I’ve turned off comment moderation and installed a Captcha plugin for comments.
4. Updated sites under “The Social” section to be current.

Please let me know if anything is not working correctly. More specifically, how the captcha plugin is working out for everyone.

Wordpress 2.3 was released yesterday and using the Automatic Upgrade plugin, the upgrade was fast and painless. The only plugin I needed to upgrade was Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator. I’ve added tag support into the sites theme and I’m slowly moving categories and old technorati tags over to the new tagging system. So expect some weirdness for the next few days as I go through 400+ posts and tag them. I’ll be completely dropping categories in favor of tags as soon as I’m finished.

As of today, I will be dropping Technorati tags in my posts. They have become too much of a hassle with very little benefit. I’ve been planning on doing it for a while but a recent blog post on Skelliwag gave me the push I needed. In addition I’ve made a few other small changes that should help with navigation.

As you can see I have a new home, Dreamhost, and a new look (yes again). While I wasn’t unhappy with my old host, they were only running MySQL 3.x so I couldn’t run Wordpress 2.1.x. I looked around at a new host for a few days before I settled on Dreamhost. I’ve read good and I’ve read bad but it ultimately came down to features and price. I mean I paid $23 for a full year using one of the hundreds of promo codes floating around the web.

Database issues
The transfer could have been smoother but that was partly my fault. I switched over the DNS before being fully prepared. The biggest issue I ran into was import my SQL databases. Trying to import from a MySQL 3.x to a 4.x doesn’t really work that great. So I had to run the SQL queries manually. I would copy and paste the new tables followed by the inserts. One thing I wish I knew before was that wp_countries is part of Slimstats which I didn’t need to import. That table itself was well over 60% of my file size. My life got much easier after I figured out I didn’t need it.

Wordpress
Dreamhost offers 1 click installs and upgrades of Wordpress which I love. It was getting to be a chore manually upgrading my wordpress install everytime a new version was released. I can also now use the Mint Bird Feeder plugin so I don’t have to update my feed files each time. So overall Wordpress has gotten a lot more hands off for me which I love. Now I can spend more time blogging instead of doing behind the scenes work.

Mint
Getting Mint back up and running wasn’t too bad. I did move Mint to its own database where as I was sharing it last time. I took the time to upgrade to the latest Mint version along with a couple outdated Peppers. Only Pepper I had problems with was Bird Feeder. With the update to Wordpress 2.1, something didn’t take. So I replaced the RSS files with the originals and downloaded and installed the WP-birdfeed plugin which adds the code on the fly. Its been working great but I lost the last 4 months worth of subscriber data.

Domain Names
My last order of business is transferring all my domain names to GoDaddy. I just purchased alecpeden.com after reading Paul Stamatiou post about Online Presence, and loved how much control I had at Godaddy. So I’m in the middle of transferring over the last two i have with another registrar and I should be good. Right now I’m not sure what I will do with alecpeden.com but for now it redirects to here.

Dreamhost
So far I’m happy with my chose to do with Dreamhost. I’m digging having everything under one roof now. I now even have a alec @ the8thsign.com email. Shocking.

Also Dreamhost has a nice Rewards system for referrals. Someone made out of me when I used a code I found online so now you can help me out. I’ve created code “the8thsign” to use if want to sign up and get $97 off your order. This is a referral and I do make money on this somehow but $97 off is nice. My first year went from $120 down to $23.

New Design
I know I just changed designs a few weeks ago but I was never really happy with it. So now with moving to a new host, I got a new look with I’m loving. I’m still making changes and you may see some weird stuff for the new week while i mess around but overall I’m pretty happy with its current state. I still have some work to do but it shouldn’t take me long.