Wordpress

Tales From Behind The Blog

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My search for the perfect template marches forward. I spent most of today venturing through WordPress.org and the four corners of the internet to find a template that doesn’t completely piss me off. When searching I get bombarded with e-commerce, portfolio, business, and anything NOT A BLOG. The current one would be fine if I could get the YouTube links to display properly on smaller devices, but no matter what settings I play with it’s never the proper aspect ratio. Of course, most of the templates I’ve been looking at don’t display YouTube videos on the front page. Why not? Another irritating trend I’m seeing is AI being built into some of the themes… Jesus Butt Fucking Christ, I don’t want AI in my theme suggesting to me how to write a post!

There are still multiple search terms I haven’t tried yet, but I’m getting tired of just searching for “Blog Theme” and having it also pull up business templates. It would be ideal if they added an option to uncheck options like e-commerce and the others just so I can find something that doesn’t make me look like a business corporation. This is a personal blog that shares videos… how is that so hard to accommodate for?

The Blog Fashion Show Continueith

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Original Artwork Can Be Found Here

Another evening spent playing with the site… I didn’t like the lack of widgets when looking at blog posts, and while I’m on the fence about this current template it does at least get a better load score than the previous one. I’m comfortable leaving it like this for now, and I can start looking at other themes and plugins at a more leisurely pace. So far the only thing I don’t like about this one is the lack of banner options. That can be saved for another night. I also did some database pruning, got rid of a bunch of entries from all the templates I’ve been checking out.

Now I can spend the remainder of my evening chilling out.

Preparing For Another Round Of Site Renovations

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Been playing around with blog configurations this evening, thinking it’s time for another update on appearances, and eventually a complete revamping under the hood. The latter will need more time to put together, might make a autumn/winter project out of it. In the meantime I’ve been looking at newer themes to run that fit what I’m doing. This one has been nice, but I might do better with something more modern, will continue my wordpress adventures with fresh eyes tomorrow.

Time For A Lil’ Makeover

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Made some changes to the blog tonight! Replaced the RSS plugin that I was using for fetching my Mastodon posts with a more proper plugin, plus I played with the look of the site. I decided to lighten the colors up a bit since we have a Dark Mode to use as an alternative. 🙂 There are a couple more things I’d like to implement and change, but this will do for now.

I did get through another chapter of BloodRayne Betrayal: Fresh Bites, been playing it here and there in my spare time. Stopped on Chapter 9 tonight. This has to be one of the hardest Metroidvanias I’ve ever played hands down. I died so many times trying to get past pools of acid without missing platforms. It makes the Shantae series look like child’s play by comparison.

I Have Achieved Blogception

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I’ve added an RSS feed from my Mastodon to my WordPress! If you look to your left on desktop, or scroll to the bottom on mobile – you’ll find my Mastodon feed! I’m starting to get a modest follower base on there! Lots of fellow users of the Deck of Steam, and Linux nerds. So far my overall experience with it has been good, even boosted a celebrity or two. 😉

Unexpected Downtime

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If you happened to visit the website (or any of the other connected websites) and were unable to access it I have to apologise. I woke up this morning and found that none of my WordPress sites could connect to their databases, and I couldn’t properly get to it until I got off work several hours later. Fortunately I found the problem… sorta. There was an important process that appeared to have crashed, and in one terminal command I had everything back up and running within minutes of arriving home. I’m still not too sure how or why it crashed though, the logs don’t have much to offer me for clues. This goes without saying, but I will be keeping a close watch. It doesn’t appear to be anything malicious at least.

 

***Update***

I seemed to have triggered it again when posting. This will require further experimentation.

Goodbye CentOS. Long Live AlmaLinux!

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As of this post I’m officially up and running on the new AlmaLinux webserver! All databases are pointing to their proper locations, the new Guild Of Slackers website is up!… kinda. I’m doing a bit of redecorating before I go live with it. 😀 I’ll probably unleash the wiki once I finish my plans for the main website — it’s basically going to be a web-portal of sorts, showing group information and our lines of communication (Discord, Mumble, Steam Group etc). I don’t see much of a point in making it a group website like before, especially since most people use the above mentioned for communication purposes. Then I still have to do the gameservers… then I can take a break from dependency hell and get back to focusing on the more artsy digital stuff.

I’m Baaaaaaaack…

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Ok… if you’re reading this, then I actually did something right!

This blog is now on the new webserver! It took some trial and error getting it transferred and viewable, but it has been done! My brain has overcome dependency hell. Now to take care of all the other sheeeet.

The Upgradening Approaches

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I’m planning to move the websites over to the AlmaLinux server tomorrow, so you can expect there will be some downtime while I get everything in place. I’m already backing some files via sftp, and I’ve already backed off the SQL databases and virtual host files. So far the only snag I’ve run into is installing phpMyAdmin, but that can be set aside for now. I’m going to experiment with wp cli to get the databases up and running for each WordPress install.

Status Report: WWW Edition

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I’m having issues getting a plugin called BuddyPress to work properly; it installs without any errors, but if I try to load the activity page, or any page that comes with BuddyPress it doesn’t load properly. It might be an issue with javascripting according to a couple places I’ve read. Sadly I’ll have to shelve this for another day.

On the bright side I did get the last of the personal blogs transferred over tonight. I’m thinking of trying to animate some more stuff tomorrow, on another project that feels like it’s taking an eternity and a half…. it’ll be worth it though when I finally release it one of these months.