Category Archives: Site Changes

I have a bunch of things to fix. I’ve updated to a new theme, and it needs to have fewer serifs and more green. I have to reinstate all my old uploaded photos. And I want to play with various plugin settings for comments and stats and crossposts and stuff.

So what happened to my site? The short version is it got hacked, probably ages ago but I just noticed last week, and when I tried to fix it by installing an all new WordPress, something went wrong. Something which I’m pretty sure is my fault although I don’t know what I did wrong.

Dreamhost’s customer support was very fast and thorough, though, and all seems to be well now. Dreamhost is great, btw. And they don’t have sexist commercials (and if you use that other company I do actually think a little less of you).

I’d been rethinking my blog strategy lately, and when I thought I’d be starting from scratch I came up with some new plans. You probably haven’t noticed this, but for the last two years I’ve kept up a pretty regular schedule–writing posts on Wednesdays, and Monday posts that cycle through a certain set of topics. It helped me start blogging regularly, but the problem is sometimes I don’t have time to make a good post, but I feel obliged to post anyway. Plus my writing group set up a group blog, and three posts a week is a lot.

So I’ve decided to ditch the schedule and just post when I feel like it. Even more than the schedule, it was setting aside a specific time of the week to blog that made it possible to post regularly. I lost that regular time ages ago, but I decided a few weeks ago to use Friday lunches.

Which is not to say that blogging is a chore. I like blabbing my thoughts all over the Internet. I just have a habit of a) writing posts in my head instead of in pixels and b) being too busy to do things just because I think they’re fun (this is why “read” now has a slot on my daily calendar).

I’m not sure how “renew website registration for one year” turned into “and also register new domain and transfer everything to it”, but that’s what I’ve been doing all evening.

This post is a test.

Added a random isearan word generator and a list of a few of my writing-related articles to the website.

Also updated the site’s main page with more links, including Digg and Associated Content.

Redid a bunch of the css.

Still to come: adding piles of research notes and recipes.

• Added snippets from my Google Reader Shared Items to the sidebar, thanks to code from Mike Crute and help from a friend.

• Turned off the rich text editor that was eating my paragraph breaks.

• updated the list of projects on the main page
• updated the writing project timeline

Made cosmetic changes to the links list on the home page and updated the writing history chart.

Added a blog. Nothing to see here yet!

I have finally uploaded the first section of my notes about early life at Harvard College.

Three more chapters of notes to go. At this rate they’ll be up in 2010.

The notes are very skimpy, the result of transcribing five-year-old handwritten scribbles made when I thought I could go look at the book in the library any time I wanted.

It’s a nice project to have around – makes me feel I’ve done something useful with my time when really I’m just putting off working on chapter 2.

In other website additions, I added a link to the Colonial Williamsburg magazine, which is a fun source of colonial (mostly Virginia, of course) info.