the Mind’s Chew Toy

I was feeling pretty happy with myself after updating the site to a personalized blog, which was based on bits and pieces I liked about other free themes out there. Unfortunately, since I’m still learning this thing called WordPress, the code didn’t come out so well and there were all sorts of problems.

As more and more problems kept popping up (and the upcoming wedding prevented me from having the time to really sit down and go through all of them), I started to get the ol’ bloggin’ blues. Plus, I began to realize that the green I had used predominantly for the blog - while fresh at the start - got a little irritating as time went by.

So, some of you may have wondered where I’ve been the past few weeks, as I haven’t put up anything new except for WWE show recaps. Now that you’re here, you’re already aware what I’ve been up to - it’s the new look of PezXPress WonderPause!

When I first started Pezazzle PezXPress WonderPause, I was working with a program that was brand-new to me at the time: NetObjects Fusion. While this was decent, once the site started getting a little bit bigger, NetObjects Fusion became somewhat of a deterrent to creating more content, as every site change had to be done on every single page.

Later, a new computer came installed with Macromedia Dreamweaver MX, and I switched to that as soon as possible, as it’s template files and it’s more intuitive ability on website design really helped save time when updating changes sitewide - and opened the door to doing even more with the site.

More recently, I stumbled across WordPress - and life got even easier. With it’s database function built right in, it again opened whole new worlds of possibilty to me, and I switched ASAP (although I have kept some files in Dreamweaver - including the “Today’s Birthdays” original pages seen on the right side of the home page).

With WordPress Themes, I realized if I ever wanted to change the look of the site, all I had to do was install a new theme, and the change was effective sitewide immediately. Plus, with the huge amounts of free themes available, I could change the site as often as I wanted, and never worry about my (very miniscule) website operating budget.

So, wordpress.org keeps coming out with update after update of WordPress, and I’ve largely ignored that last couple of updates. I upgraded (with not much difficulty) to WordPress 2.05, but just didn’t see the need to go to 2.06 or 2.07 as they didn’t seem to be worth upgrading to. 2.06 was a minor fix that I hadn’t had a problem with, and 2.07 was a bug fix to 2.06.

When I was notified 2.1 was now available, I decided to check out what this upgrade included: a new look to the admin screen, a spell checker for posts, the ability to have posts in “Draft” status, the ability to set any page as the home page, an auto-save feature for posts, and a faster MySQL connection.

If you’re just starting to put together a WordPress blog, one snippet of code in your header file will make things so much easier…

I read once that having a links directory on your website is good for helping to promote your site. Searching around a bit, I finally found just what I was looking for, and it was free! The solution: PHP Links Directory (from phplinkdirectory.com - the free version is in the left sidebar).

It did everything I could ask for: it stored the links in a database, so updating was extremely easy; you could add a description of the link; you could specify whether the link would open in a new window; you can select specific links as featured links (always on top and set apart from the rest of the links on the page); the links were arranged into categories (which helps eliminate long link lists, which google and other search engines frown upon); you could click a button to have the program check all reciprocal links, and the look was highly customizable! Perfect…until I switched to WordPress.

Less than 3 weeks after beginning to convert PezXPress.com TheMindsChewToy.com to WordPress, I get a notice in my Dashboard about a WordPress upgrade: WordPress 2.0.5 - Ronan. Since this was my first time installing an upgrade (since I started with version 2.0.4), I backed up anything and everything in the site before downloading the file from wordpress.org: the database, all of the folders in my wordpress directory. Every Single Little Thing.