More Blog Updates
March 25, 2007 Posted by Tyler CruzI spent the past couple days working on my blog. Here’s a recap:
- RSS Update
- WordPress Update
- Technorati Drop
- Categories Added
RSS Update
I reached a new RSS record, hitting 454 subscribers. Unfortunately at the time of this post, it dropped back down to 427. My goal is still to average 500.
WordPress Update
I upgraded WordPress to 2.1.2. I actually hadn’t upgraded it once since installing it last year, so I had upgraded from 2.0.4 to 2.1.2 which was quite a jump. Here are all the versions I missed inbetween:
2.0.4, 2.0.5-RC1, 2.0.5-beta-1, 2.0.5, 2.0.6-RC1, 2.0.6-RC2, 2.0.6-beta1, 2.0.6, 2.0.7-RC1, 2.0.7-RC2, 2.0.7, 2.0.8-RC1, 2.0.8, 2.0.9-RC1, 2.0.9-beta, 2.0.9, 2.0, 2.1-RC1, 2.1-RC2, 2.1-beta1, 2.1-beta2, 2.1-beta3, 2.1-beta4, 2.1.1-RC1, 2.1.1-beta, 2.1.1, 2.1.2.
That’s 25 upgrades I missed!
Anyhow, 2.1.2 isn’t a whole lot different from 2.0.4. It mainly fixed a lot of very small bugs and security issues. I don’t plan on updating for another year or two.. I wonder how many upgrades I’ll miss between now and then…
Technorati Drop
As John Chow stated in a post today, Technorati fixed an issue that counted each post from his blog as in individidual blog. As a result, since I’m link partners with him, my Technorati rank dropped dramatically from 1,600 to 16,000! A 15,000 rank drop.
While that sucks, I don’t mind it too much. I like that Technorati fixed it in that it means less people can influence it and give falsified information. I figure I’ll get back to 1,600 again, it’s just a matter of time.
However, I hope it doesn’t hurt my future TylerReviews. Also, it will hurt my ReviewMe ranking, but not for another month when they update it 🙂
Categories Added
I read all the reviews that people write about my blog from my TylerReviews offer, and I’ve already made a couple changes from repeat suggestions. One that I hadn’t done yet though was the suggestion that I should add categories to my blog.
I debated over doing this for a while, but finally decided to do it. I spent my last 4 work sessions (a total of 4 hours) going through each and every one of my past posts and categorizing them.
I now have the following categories: Articles, Blog Related, Miscellaneous, My Websites, Personal, and Videos. I made the difficult decision of attributing each post to only one category. This was a very difficult decision as many of my posts, especially from 2006, used to have multiple topics per post.
However, I did this for SEO reasons. I’ve heard from a variety of sources that search engines prefer this, the most recent source being Gray Wolf’s video.
You can find links to my categories down the right side, underneath the Recent Posts section.
As I did this, I also cleaned up some older posts that were messed up from when I converted from Blogger to WordPress. Some were simply not imported properly, so I had to re-add videos to some, change some titles, and remove some duplicate posts.
I also had somebody else import my data for me, so I had all my Blogger posts under the author of someone else. There seemed to be no way to change this in WordPress so I did it manually in MySQL. Since I knew that his author ID was 2 and mine was 1, I issued the following command: update wp_posts set post_author=”1″ where post_author=”2″. So use that if you find yourself in a similar situation.
Also, going through all my posts one by one gave me a lot to think about. For one, I definitely believe that keeping each post to only one topic and posting once a day instead of writing extremely long posts with a variety of different topics, posting once every 5 days or so, has definitely been a wise move. I also noticed that my posts used to really, really suck. Especially from 2005. It’s interesting to notice the slow metamophasis over the past two years.
I also noticed I used to write a lot about my websites and haven’t for quite some time. I think I’m going to do this again, but it will be a bit of a risk.
Anyhow, that’s all for now 🙂
Well I do not really know how your system is set up security wise, but I guess it’s a wm with this server on or something.
However hearing about not updating a popular widly-used system in 1-2 years is pain to my ears!
Wordpress is used by many thus security issues will get a lot of attension and get in the hands of script-kiddies and other malicious “hackers” who will do mass exploit attacks on the net just waiting to find one sorry dude who didn’t patch or upgrade.
Now the security issues may not have been any serious ones, but imagine in 3 months one does pop up?
Also why bother risking to get defaced etc? Just pain and waste of time.
I completely agree with krillz – not updating is begging for trouble, especially when you consider the popularity of WordPress. Its popularity means there are people always working on security loopholes – please please keep it updated!
I agree. One should always keep up to date as much as possible with such updates, but unfortunately I don’t really have the time to do this..
I run a couple dozen sites and use many various scripts as a result. For example, I believe I have 9 active vBulletin licenses, and updating those takes me a good few hours, just to update!
I do try to read if any major security flaws are in WP, and if so, then I’ll update, but if they are just minor security bugs, I’ll wait.
I know this isn’t the best response, but even if I do get defaced, now that I have DiscSync set up, it will only be a minor hassle… and spending the time to keep updating everything is a cost/benefit calculation…
Having to worry about what plug-ins will be compatible, etc. and then taking my site down to upgrade it constantly, is truly a pain. I mean, there were 25 updates in just about a year’s span! that’s 1 every two weeks… just for WordPress…
Why do you say it is a risk to talk about your sites?
1. I think my articles I’ve been writing recently provide more traffic and interest to my blog than talking about my sites.
2. If I could count the number of blatant direct copies of my ideas and sites people have undertaken, I’d need a calculator.
[…] More Blog Updates […]