I started this blog in February 2005, which means it’s 18 years old. In Canada, that means my blog can drive, vote in federal elections and join the army. It has to wait a bit longer before it can gamble.
But I don’t have to wait, and gamble I did!
Since WordPress has no easy way to work in a staged environment, when you want to make changes, you either have to go through the rigmarole of setting up a local server, or just make changes on your live site and hope for the best.
Which is what I’ve been doing the last few days.
What I have learned:
- After 18 years, my site has accumulated a lot of legacy cruft
- This cruft can do interesting and/or alarming things when you poke at it
- Different parts connect in unexpected ways. Imagine if your elbows connected to your knees, it’s kind of like that.
- Things that should work logically will often defy logic
- Sometimes it turns out to be user error
- More than a few times, really
- But not always!
- Planning ahead is a good thing to do
- I should have planned ahead, which I did not do
- But even just starting on this journey, I have cleaned up a lot of that cruft:
- Old, inactive widgets have been purged
- Outdated links and thingies have been removed
- Legacy stuff has been converted over to blocks where possible
- I’ve backed up all the weird CSS changes that are in Simple CSS
- I’ve documented every weird thing I’m likely to forget
- I’ve experimented with colours, but right now it’s just a sedate green/grey combo
- I will actually need to figure out what I want to show up front and what will be tucked away
Currently, the site looks a lot more green. I added some nice rounded corners on the individual posts because round corners are the new hot thing. But it’s otherwise pretty stripped down and ready for more serious remodelling. This stuff takes a lot of time, so I’m not sure how quickly it will happen, but at least I’ve started.