(last edited on February 15, 2023 at 12:27 pm)
I have just finished moving my website from one WordPress installation to another. While it may look largely the same as the old site, I’m now running davidseah.com on a completely new theme called Dante. Details follow!
The Death of Moose
It was only eight months ago when I had moved to another theme called Moose as a replacement for my creaky hand-build design, but I found that Moose had several inefficiencies lurking within its code. In fact, the original designers no longer support it after only a year on the market, dropping it completely. Bah.
As the last WordPress update seemed to break the functionality of my home page, so I was forced to accelerate migration to the new theme. It’s taken about 50 hours to just move the site over, but it’s done and I like the new theme better. Under the hood, it seems cleanly coded, and the developer Swift Ideas seems to maintain their work over several years; this is Dante version 2.80 as of this writing.
Adjustments to WordPress
I’ve taken the opportunity to rejigger my WordPress plugin stack. Gone is Jetpack Markdown, replaced with the ancient PHP Markdown Extra because it is just more reliable, still runs on my older server, and doesn’t create a migration headache. JetPack Markdown already destroyed my pristine Markdown setup for very little gain in utility. Most of the posts on the site have some glitchy conversion characters in them that I will have to clean by hand.
Gone also is WP Fastest Cache, replaced again by Supercache+BWP Minify. This combination of plugins works better to combine multiple CSS and Javascript files into one for efficiency. WP Fastest Cache has this ability built-in and complains if another minifying plugin is installed, but it also doesn’t work as well.
What’s Next?
With the new site deployed, I may feel more like writing again! The old site was making me angry every time I used it, and hopefully now that negative energy is gone. I’m thinking I need to post more pictures of the hobby things I’m doing as share pieces to connect with like-minded people. I haven’t been doing a lot of that for the past several years, fixated as I have been on “creative independence” and the like.
As a reward for moving the website over, and assuming that nothing explodes, I am going to treat myself to a DSLR upgrade. I currently have a Canon EOS 40D, which came out in 2007. I’m going to upgrade to the 70D because it’s cheaper and has a swivel-out screen. I kind of want to get the 7D Mk II, but it’s $650 more. It has some more refined technical features that I kind of crave, but I have to remind myself that the 70D has a lot of improvements over what I have for considerably less money. I guess we’ll see how I feel once I’m holding one in my hand…
But first, to sleep.
7 Comments
And gone is the content in the rss feed :(
I came to this post via feedly. The entire post used to be displayed there but now it’s only the title? Wasn’t sure if you did that on purpose or a bug with the new theme. :)
It’s a bug! Trying to track it down…thanks for your patience!
I tracked it down to a bug in the parent theme code. I registered to the support forum to raise hell, only to find they had already found and fixed it for the next release. I guess that’s something, and it is good to see that they have a responsive tech team.
Testing the captchca to see if it actually works.
hi dave! i love your blog and all the planning printables! (and i do use them) i’m working on my thesis and came accross you pages tracking printables and thought…. did you ever considered doing a printable to track the amount of books read? not only the pages but the names, title, autor…. etc! like a index plus tasks maybe! if there’s a tool i can use to help please recomend it! best regards salome
Salome: That’s a great idea! Maybe they could be like old-fashioned library cards! There could be some kind of mini library shrine to keep all the cards in, like a little house that fit on your bookshelf! I’m sure there must be something like this on Etsy. I know there are digital versions like Goodreads which might work too for you. I have an account and never update it, though.