Blog upgrades, my new favorite WordPress plugin
This will be kind of a boring post, I apologize. That being said I’m writing this on Memorial Day (yesterday, by the time this goes up) so you have to cut me some slack! It’s completely beautiful out. May weather is finally here. Here’s what I’m going to talk about today: WordPress. Last Friday I finally upgraded this blog to the latest version of the WordPress blogging software (2.5.1). It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time but when you look back at a year’s worth of work you kind of become wary about tempting fate. It was the sort of thing where, sure, it seemed easy enough but if I lost my posts from the past year (however low their quality) I’d be a little angry. That being said I needed to upgrade because I’m planning on some additions to the blog in the coming months and I figured to minimize risk of compatibility issues it would be smart to be using whatever’s current. So then, how did it go?
Quite well, actually. Here’s the guide I worked off of, and I have to say all I really did was follow their steps right down the list. The most important part of their tutorial are the first two steps – backing your blog up. The first thing I did was FTP’d into my hosting surface and pulled down a local copy of the entire /blog directory. I made a couple copies just to be sure. Then, I backed up WordPress’ database. The backup was hosted in the cloud though, so I was a little nervous about not having a local copy but what can you do. After backing up I started in on the actual upgrade process, starting with downloading the latest version of the WordPress software (you can find it here) and deactivating all of my old plugins. Once that’s taken care of the hardest work comes – you have to go through and make sure you delete all of the old files you don’t need anymore while keeping important WordPress files that keep all of the existing information about your blog. The important files to keep, without going into too much detail, are the wp-config.php file in the root of your blog and everything in the wp-content folder aside from themes and plugins you may want to get rid of. There are some others (again, reference the walkthrough) but a lot of them apply to much older versions of WordPress then the one I was upgrading from (2.1).
After that’s done it’s basically a matter of uploading all of the new files via FTP. Once all of the new files are up your blog should be back up and running. You can go ahead and reactivate your older plugins and do whatever you need to do. Basically the lesson I learned from all of this was that the WordPress software is much heartier than I expected. I didn’t have any problems at all regarding the upgrade itself, everything went smooth and, as you can tell, the blog is running fine now. A lot of the changes were aesthetic, the new dashboard is much prettier than the older one, plus there have been a ton of features added to the actual editor which makes me happy to use the default WYSIWYG to write posts. My favorite feature is the ability to take the editor full-screen, so it almost makes it seem like you’re working from a word processor or desktop blogging application like Live Writer. Pretty good stuff.
After everything was up and running again the first thing I did was add a new plugin I heard about on net@nite, a podcast on the TWiT network. The plugin has to do with blog comments, a feature of this blog that I find a little too underused! Let me start off by making a comparison – I’ve made posts before saying that I like Pownce’s execution of microblogging more than Twitter’s. The two main reasons for that are that it looks prettier and also the way they do replies is so much more intuitive than Twitter. With Pownce if you reply to someone’s message it’s displayed on a threaded page that’s kind of like a forum. I find this format much easier to read and comprehend – that’s what this plugin does for blog comments. It’s called Disqus.
Installing Disqus is just like installing any other plugin, just upload it into the plugins directory on your WordPress blog and then activate it in the dashboard. Boom, you immediately have threaded comments on your blog without any fuss. Of course this is completely useless if someone doesn’t leave a comment every now and again, so do me a favor and leave one! You can do so by clicking the link right below the title of this post where it says "# comments" where # is the number of comments that have been posted so far. Let me know Disqus works! I’ll start it out by leaving my own comment, and hopefully that will spark some discussion. =)
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