Pop’s Blog

Ok, I know I said I was going to learn to theme from scratch. Then it didn’t happen. Now, it’s beginning to happen, only at another home. I started with DocsBlog. After I got a start, I moved on to a WP test installation for FlowerElectronics. So that’s where to look.

The only point of this site, it seems, is to attract occasional spam comments. Why in the hell anyone would want to spam a place no one visits is beyond me, but there you have it. I’ve now got Akismet up and running, so that should help to filter out the a-holes. If not, I can always log in every six months or so and delete them. It’s not like the comments are visible. It’s all moderated. So, if you’re a spammer thinking of leaving a comment, do yourself a favor. Your comment will never become visible until I say so, and that’s bloody unlikely.

I was originally planning on just modifying the css for whatever default theme that showed up. That ran me into some issues. One of which was that I stupidly just modified the “default” theme, and once I upgraded my installation, I got reverted to the WP default.

Then, I thought I might copy over a theme and mod that. That’s sort of what’s going on at the moment. The problem is, at some point I need to make FlowerElectronics.com look like, well, FlowerElectronics.com. So I have to reproduce the various divs and ids and so forth. Thus, I’m going to do from scratch. I looked at stuff on the web that was alleged to tell me, but I’ve since ordered a dead-tree book. So, in the next few weeks, with luck, I’ll get there.

Interesting, modifying my TextPattern installations so that they’d look like other things, like FlowerElectronics.com, for example, was trivial. But in the end I’ve decided to go with WP, in part because, people can use a rich-text editor and won’t have to learn textile. I like textile, but can’t expect non-nerds to learn it. So, WP it is. Also, there’s the issue that WP is very actively supported, and I can’t see that there’s a whole hell of a lot of TxP development anymore. Little bits, but not much.

So, there seems to be some kind of horrible worm going around which attacks WP installations. Thus, I figured I should “upgrade” my WP installs to the latest and greatest. Having practiced migration of one WP install to a new location, I had two installs to fix.

The first thing I did was click the “upgrade” button on my newer install. So it overwrote my styles and I was reverted to the old, standard WP theme. WTF? Apparently, when I tried making up my own theme, all I’d done was edit the default WP template, so it reverted things to the real default template.

So I went to my original install and copied over the personal style. Then I realized I wanted, for some reason, to have the style actually personalized, and not claim to be what it was not, i.e. the WP default. That meant I had to dislodge my unix skills from the deep recesses of my memory, and make up a new themes directory and copy things into it.

I’m not sure where this is going, and I have other things to do, so I’m going to stop in mid post. Suffice to say, everything is now borked on both sites. Somehow, my theme only got half copied and the text and background are now the same color, or something, so you can’t read a damn thing. WTF?

I haven’t even fixed the things wrong on this site, and already I’m doing new things. At the moment, I’m in the process of learning to migrate this installation to a new location. The theory is that once I manage that, I’ll be able to help someone else do the same…and they’ll even give me a bit of cash for my efforts. I didn’t want to hit them up until I was sure I could do it. Static sites are trivial to migrate. My guess is this WP install won’t be much different. We’ll see.

The steps, as I see it are as follows:

1. back up the current site
2. create a new domain
3. install WP on the new domain
4. export the data base from the old domain to a file
5. import the old domain’s DB to the new domain
6. see if it all works.

That seems easy enough. We’ll see.

If you’re looking at this site on anything other than Opera, you’ll notice it looks funny as hell. That’s because I tried to fix the look of things, so as to make this WP install look more-or-less like other sites I have made for myself. Trying to keep consistent self branding, so to speak. Basically, I’ve created a disaster.

The first problem is WP doesn’t seem to have any rational system of naming. Actually, I’m sure it does, but I like simple, so I’m not one to have classes embedded inside IDs embedded inside tags. If it gets hard, it sort of defeats the purpose of the whole exercise. At least to me it does.

The second problem is I don’t believe in fixed-pixel sizing for things. People need to have the flexibility to resize fonts and view ports.  Their preferences are none of my damn business. Perhaps they have a low resolution monitor, or weak eyesight. If I fix things with pixels, they can’t really do that. So, for some reason, what I called an em when I set things up in Opera, changed to something quite different in IE and Chrome and FF. WTF?

So, eventually, I’ll get around to fixing things, I presume. The major lesson from today, however, is how much easier it is to set things up and style them in TextPattern. I think I might stick with TxP after all.

So, after lots of tribulations, I’ve finally managed to install caching for this WP installation.  The problem was that the site had virtually no content, but still behaved like a pig.  If you don’t believe me, look at the Monpage graph from yesterday:

Response times for Pop's Blog, Wednesday, October 1, 2008

For Comparison, here’s the same period of time for my TextPattern install, slothoughts:

Response times for slothoughts, Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Obviously, the TxP install is doing much better.  Both blogs sit on the same server that serves up several static sites, among them Flower Electronics.  Here’s the graph for Flower Electronics during the same time frame:

Response times for Flower Electronics, Wednesday, October 1, 2008

So, you see the problem is not the server, but the piggish WP install.

In a day or two, I’ll check back to see if installing caching on the WP install makes things oodles faster.  One can only hope.

To my kids, I’m known as pop.  I blame it all on Jessica, whose favorite book at one time was Hop on Pop by Dr. Seuss.  Anyway, I resisted the designation for quite some time, but have eventually embraced it.  Most fathers are called Dad or Daddy or even Father, but I’m pop.  So be it. I have über-cool kids, so that helps.

First we have Jessica, who is a sound musician, sound performance artist, electronics boutique entrapreneur, … also a student in engineering at UMass/Lowell, having figured out that a Master’s of Fine Arts doesn’t even pay for coffee.  Then there’s Justin, an amazing guitarist (jazz, blues, classical, rock, whatever).  And finally, Zach, who lived in Japan and does all manner of weird and creative things.