If you’ve been wondering about my relative absence the past few days, I’ve working on a longish article on blog design for my new monthly column “O Tech!” at Read Write Poem: How to Reach the Masses. It’s geared toward poetry bloggers, but should contain some useful tips for anyone with a blog or website. As I say at the end of the piece, I’m still very much a learner when it comes to the web. But I do enjoy it, and I like sharing what little knowledge I’ve acquired over the years.
I’ve also been a little preoccupied with Via Negativa’s little-sister blog The Morning Porch, which I’ve moved off Tumblr and onto a WordPress installation with the aid of a handy export tool I found online. I may or may not stick with the current design; most of my attention so far has been on getting a couple of plugins to work with untitled posts. Fun!
Why did you leave Tumblr? I thought you loved it.
They started putting ads on the dashboard. It was an ad for some dumb concert they were sponsoring, but still. Also, I wanted to do things like show related posts on single-post pages and automagically link to posts on the same date from previous years. And the previous and next post links in Tumblr had never worked all that well — sometimes they’d skip a week.
Any hey, I’ve finally found a use for WP’s “quickpress” feature!
If you’re still a learner I’d hate to think what the rest of us are.
Well, a lot of people are content just to learn a few techniques and leave it at that, and that’s fine. Or it would be, if the damn technology weren’t always changing! But I assure you, my knowledge base is quite average for a self-hosted WordPress.org user. The way they keep updating the core software and the plugins, you can’t afford not to keep up with it if you don’t want to get hacked. I learned that lesson the hard way.
Excellent piece on RWP, Dave. Agree about having to keep up with the technology. I used to put a lot more effort into that at one time, but these days, I’m falling seriously behind. Oh well!
Well, as long as you’re keeping up with major updates and security patches, you should be O.K. — unless you’re using plugins broken by newer versions. That can be a pain.