Tag Archives: wordpress

Internet litter. Blech, just blech.

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I spend a few minutes every day looking for interesting golf-related articles to share via my golf association’s Facebook and Twitter feeds.

And wow. There is so much garbage out there. More than ever.

So thanks a lot, all you “get rich on the Internet” types who think you can throw up a website, regurgitate colorless, uninteresting, overly-generalized, zero-value articles and then “monetize” them via Google ads.

Because guess what. I’m sure it works to a point. I’m sure your artful use of keywords will pull in a bit of search engine traffic. I’m sure there are a handful of people who will click on your Twitter links — at least until they learn how little value your links deliver.

But if you think this can pass for a genuine, productive business model, you’re kidding yourself. Nobody is going to stick around long enough to click on your ads if your articles are junk. They’re going to do what I do: read about 5 or 6 words, then go straight to the little x in the left hand corner of the page and go bye-bye.

And while we’re at it, I unfollow Tweeps when the links they serve up keep falling into the garbage category.

Think I’m the only one who wises up after a bit?

New other stuff :-)

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Okay, I went a bit overboard, wouldn’t you say? New background, changed the column background from white to pale green . . . yes, green’s my favorite color. But this is a bit over the top. I feel like I’m peering into a dish of lime Jello. (Is there an award for greenest blog btw?)

Trouble is, there are always little issues that come up. The theme is basically Kubrick, modified — if you’ve ever installed WordPress, you’ll know what I’m talking about . . . over the years, I’ve tweaked it in various ways. But right now, with these latest changes, I can’t get the .widecolumn to match up to the header exactly, and I can’t get the bottom margin of .widecolumn to match up with the bottom of the sidebar.

For the header, what I really need is help from a designer. Blurring out the photo helps make the title pop, which is a good thing, but it’s plain ugly typeface, which is not a good thing. Unfortunately my tools are limited, and so’s my time — we might have to live with it for awhile.

That said,  y’all come here for the scintillating prose, not how pretty it looks, right?

:-)

golf blog

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Late last night, after a negotiating a harrowing technological labyrinth on and off for several days, I managed to upgrade to the latest WordPress version on my golf blog, Golfolicious.

It shouldn’t have been hard. I’ve put up a half dozen WordPress sites at this point; for the installation, my preference is Fantastico, an application deployment tool bundled with many hosting services. You pretty much click a button and you’re done. Even better, when it’s time to upgrade, you can use the same tool.

My Golfolicious WordPress instance, however, wasn’t originally installed using Fantastico — so I hesitated trying to use the tool to upgrade.

I could have done a manual upgrade, but the instructions published in the WordPress codex were long, complex, and included steps that I would have had to research further to fully understand.

Finally, I hit on another idea. I own the .net and .org versions of the domain name, as well as the .com. Maybe I could install a current version on the .net, transfer my theme, posts, and comments over, and then point the .com to the .net when I was done?

Call that plan B. Plan A, executed only when I’d done enough research on Plan B to satisfy myself that it was viable, was to try Fantastico.

I did. Didn’t work. Broke the site. Took me awhile to backtrack enough to make it somewhat usable again.

Plan B, OTOH, worked like a charm — particularly since the WordPress Wizards, my heroes, have built in handy import/export tools that make it extremely simple to transfer posts & comments between blogs/URLs/host servers.

Is there anything they haven’t thought of?

I heart WordPress!

And while I’m at it, I also heart Hostgator, my hosting service. Their chat tech support staff are awesome. They are patient, they are cheerful, they take the initiative to do a little extra research if needed to make sure an issue is resolved satisfactorily — my experience with them has really been top notch.

So thanks for all your help as I wrestled through that upgrade, Hostgator!

Now I need to catch up on golf blog posts. I put one up after I finished the upgrade last night — post about a late June trip to play a couple of courses at the Turning Stone resort. Scroll down to see my photo of a wild turkey :-)