Oh come on, I’ve made worse references.
Tonight I did some dp.n maintenance. I now own my domain for at least the next two years. I have no recollection of whether my hosting package automatically renews or not, so the site may still dissapear in five more days. I’ll try to pre-empt that.
I also upgraded my WordPress software. That’s basically everything that you’re looking at. I used to write 100% of my own code, and now I’m lazy and let blog software handle my posts, layout and pages, subpages, and photo gallery. Do I feel any less hack? Not really. I could still do it the hard way if I wanted.
I backed up my entire website, plus an additional WordPress backup, PLUS I imported it to my wordpress.com account (the software comes from wordpress.org, which is functionally an entirely different entity). I was getting ready to manual install the software and then I had an incredible idea. What if my host’s control panel would do it for me automatically? Turns out my hunch was right, and rather than spending the next three hours hacking away at code and uploading it all, here I sit with a new install of WordPress on my server, and all it took was three clicks and about 40 seconds.
At any rate, it probably looks no different to you. No changes even for those (few) of you who login to leave comments. My control panel is organized a little differently (different, not better). My posts will have a couple more categories to go into (I had reached the limit of number of categories I could have in the previous software version, but that number has since been increased). But no automatic aesthetic differences.
So was I prepared to upgrade, even before I knew it would be easy? Well, basically the entire reason I upgraded my software was to get rid of this annoying little message that told me every time I logged in that I needed to upgrade from version 3.1 to version 3.7. And the first thing I did when I finished was login to WordPress and glance up at the top of my dashboard.
Frakking message is still there. It now just says I need to go from version 3.7 to 3.7.1. Manually. Yeah right.
In fact, it will probably be right around February 2011 that I bother to make any major changes, when domainsite and intersabre start reminding me that my domain is going to expire again. But it has definitely been fun to look through all my files as they downloaded through my ftp client and take note of all that I’ve written, all that I’ve learned about web hosting, software, plugins, and writing since February 16th-ish last year. And certainly to think about all the things I’ve had to write about since then: Hospitality, smiles, children, airplane rides (ten), different countries, states and a districts, a dozen new best friends in an 11-hour range of time zones, a jungle, unexpected returns to favorite places, a new instrument, a new language, brothers, a brother, my brother and bros (nope, not a typo), and the Truth that permeates every one.
