Wordpress Upgrade, New Theme and Other Stuff

For the last few days, I’ve been working on my blog – what you see and what you don’t.  This blog is managed by me, but is actually sourced at a web hosting provider.  For a while now, I’ve wanted to create a mirror of the blog on my local server in my house – a Windows Home Server box.  This took me longer than expected, but I now have the blog running in two places.  Suspenders AND a belt.

While I was at it, I upgraded to Wordpress 2.7.1, the latest and greatest blogging platform from the wonderful folks at Wordpress.  That would have gone easily, except Wordpress now has threaded comments (thanks IntenseDebate) which blew up my theme.  Additionally, my old theme had loads of PHP hacks that I had written.  So, I decided to use a new theme,  Atahualpa, which has so much high-level configurability built in, that I didn’t have to touch a single line of PHP to get what I wanted.  Very impressive.  It did not, however, make up for my complete lack of visual design skill as you can see . . .

Somewhere along the way, older posts lost the email addresses of their commenters.  My face is also appearing as the Gravatar of all commenters (yuck).  I’m gonna have to look at this further.  More disturbing is that my URL rewriter doesn’t seem to be doing its job, breaking links to other posts.  That’s gonna require some study as well.

These problems aren’t entirely unexpected and part of what happens when you manage this stuff yourself.  Of course, it’s exactly why I manage this stuff myself.  It’s hard to know how it works if you don’t get your hands dirty.