A short update

Revised: April 27, 2007

I know I’m going to end up eating my words but I thought I would post a short update to let people know what’s going on. It’s quite obvious with any blog that when the blogger disappears for a short while without notice they are normally redesigning the blog or extremely busy or both as in my case. I have had a lot of university work loaded on me the past two weeks and that load has only gone and quadrupled since taking on a film production with Joey Brannigan. Alongside all this work I have been redesigning this blog from the ground up. It will be the first template that I will have actually finished writing and considering my earlier attempts it will most likely be, in my opinion the best; although it has to be expected that a few people may disagree.

I haven’t based my new design on any other template base as its been entirely coded from scratch. I predict that with the current degree of work I have to do the new design won’t be “live” for another week at least while I fix things, which is being made all the more difficult considering that the database for this wordpress install is extremely old dating back to the first version of wordpress! So it has collected a hell of a lot of extra baggage in that time. Unfortunately there are only three ways of fixing this that I know of. One is to start the blog again from scratch, something I am not prepared to do. While the long and tedious task of manually copying over 217 posts and more than 400 comments really is too much for me to contemplate. So I have chosen the easy route, or easier route; I am writing a PHP script to copy select bits of my wordpress database - most notably the posts, categories and comments tables as well as link tables. The script will then condition the data while its stored in an array before inserting it into my new fresh wordpress install. This new install has fixed a hell of a lot of bugs which I had been noticing in the admin of the blog, bugs which actually have no plausible answer as to why they have happened such as the feeds on the dashboard being shown in reverse date order - thus me only being able to see the oldest posts in the community :| No one else seems to have had that problem except for me and I believe it to be a corruption within the config table.

Other advancements I am adding to the website are a full portfolio, about me and gallery for those of you who are interested in seeing what I have created, knowing more about me and viewing the photos I so lovingly capture and publish. There will also be an opportunity to hire me if you like my work.

Lastly or at least second to last, one third of the traffic to this blog is spam requests which is stupidly annoying and is causing undue stress on my server. Some of the spam waves have been able to knock my server out for hours which is not only against the law but an inconvenience to both myself and people who visit. I have been putting into place some counter measures to reduce the effect, these should hopefully be noticeable when the new theme is booted.

Lastly I read this about Google’s Supplemental Hell and have decided to add some counter measures to that in the new theme. I recommend you read that post and see what you can do to save your blog.

Oh and before I go, I know this is an amazingly long post or the irony. However I must also note that the new theme will most likely be available in a cut down form as a wordpress theme. I don’t know if I shall release it or not that all depends on how much interest I receive…

Good night.

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