When you have to sign a liability disclaimer, you know that the person or corporation you are dealing with knows you are about to do something risky and wants you to assume all the risk.

So having to sign a liability disclaimer (in this case, done by clicking a checkbox) before I could upgrade my installation of Wordpress on my website filled me with a sense of foreboding that quickly morphed into a full-blown cry of alarm. Not that I don’t approach these occasions with a healthy dollop of anticipation anyway. Any change of software anywhere is an invitation to disaster. We all know this in our heart of hearts.

But I couldn’t remember having to take this step whenever I upgraded my Wordpress installations via Fantastico. If Simple Scripts was such a great replacement for that now-outmoded stalwart, why did I suddenly have to sign a liability disclaimer? What did Bluehost know that I didn’t?

Well, for one thing, Simple Scripts is Bluehost’s own product. That fact seemed well disguised, but after all, this is the Internet we’re dealing with. The information is out there, you just have to look.

So my Internet Service Provider (or web host) is now asking me to assume full responsibility for using something they not only developed, but also gave me no alternative to using. It wasn’t like they said, go ahead and use Fantastico if you want, but in that case you have to sign a liability disclaimer; we trust our Simple Scripts product with our lives.

No.

It was, you have to use Simple Scripts—it’s your only choice—and oh, by the way, we’d like you to sign this little disclaimer saying we are not liable for anything that goes wrong, without which you can’t proceed.

Meanwhile, I was overdue to upgrade to Wordpress 7.1.

Now, I don’t rush to be first out of the chute with any particular upgrade. Indeed, past experience as a developer has made me loathe to upgrade almost anything that isn’t so buggy I can’t stand to continue using it anyway.

Favorite features tend to disappear; new ones I hate become troublesome. Sometimes it’s just that the new look and feel doesn’t seem as friendly to me as the old one.

And always, there’s the fear that some troublesome new monster bug will emerge to make you rue the day you pushed that Upgrade button.

So I like to let new versions mature a bit and check the  blogs occasionally to see if there’s any uproar.

Not that I’ve ever specifically had a problem with upgrading Wordpress. But you never know. No matter how much testing’s been done, I like to give everyone a chance to get the bugs out before I proceed.

But now I was ready. Betas of 2.8 were already beginning to appear and I hadn’t upgraded. Not only that, I was still at WP 6.5—a couple of upgrades behind. So I was getting anxious.

The upgrade on this site went without a hitch. The upgrade on Spotless Form went without a hitch. And so on.

But when I went to  upgrade Health Spectator, Fantastico took me as far as it could. Bluehost had decreed no more Fantastico beyond this point.

And when I switched to using Simple Scripts, the new wonder of wonders, it simply declared there was no such Wordpress installation.

I wrote the Bluehost  Support Team as follows:

I was a bit dismayed to find out that Fantastico is no longer the method of choice to upgrade my versions of Wordpress for my blogs. However, I have managed to muddle through the conversions/upgrades for a few of my sites.

With Health Spectator, though, I have a problem. The Simple Scripts screen cheerfully informs me (below):

http://healthspectator.com/wordpress/
This installation does not exist!

Note that the healthspectator installation of Wordpress (which I believe was my first) is installed in a /wordpress/ subdirectory, unlike [some of] the installations on my other sites. This may account for Simple Scripts informing me that the installation does not exist.

I can assure you that it does, and I can access the site okay. But that doesn’t help me convert the Fantastico installation to Simple Scripts or proceed with the upgrade. I believe my current healthspectator.com installation is WP 2.65, which Fantastico was kind enough to handle for me. However, having been upgraded that far, it no longer shows up in the Fantastico panel and (as I’ve already said) Simple Scripts insists that it doesn’t exist.

How should I proceed?

Truly yours,
Bill Suydam

To which someone at Bluehost wrote back:

I believe wordpress has a plugin you can install that will help you update the site. Before we cant [sic] take a further look into this we need validate the account with either the password on the account or the last four on the credit card. Thank you.

Thank you,
Matt
Technical Support Engineer

So I sent them the last four digits of my credit card.

And eventually got this response:

Unfortunately we are in the same boat as you are. The only way I can think to make it usable in the future is to back it up. Delete it, and then create a new wordpress for it, and restore to it. You could try and move the folder and then change the links to match, but that can be tricky and usually something is missed or forgotten.

Also, please make sure you have a good backup of all of your sites. Better yet, make sure you have at least 2 backups.

Thank you,
Van
Technical Support Engineer

So glad I asked.

So, in a sense, I’ve returned to my roots and in the process, become once again (ah, bliss!) an end user. We all know how much fun that can be.

One idea I’ve been toying with is that of setting up this site in particular and possibly all of my sites so that the user can select a style or theme. I know I was contemplating doing that early on in the design phase of Techismo.

What I thought I’d do was link stylesheets from a dropdown menu. In other words, I might design different features, or say, different styles of menus for the page, then let users who were curious and interested enough choose the versions of things they liked best. There was Javascript involved, naturally, but in most if not all cases there would be a different version of a stylesheet downloaded as well. While I was initially concerned with things such as versions of menus, I considered taking the whole idea as far as re-creating a theme or skin.

This is not a totally novel idea, even for websites; I believe I must have seen it done somewhere.

Well, I still think these are all good ideas, but as I’m coding at best very part-time, I try to keep paring away at the piles of unfinished posts and pages while paying attention to styles and coding as much as I can or must.

I say as much as I “can or must” because one bad practice I find resurfacing is my old tendency to make code changes too late in the evening. The end result is inevitably disaster, and then I have to spend at least half an hour, usually more, going through the panicky process of first trying to fix it, then doing a restore if my fixes don’t work right. (That late in the night, they seldom do.) About 20 years ago, I made a rule for that: don’t code past 10 o’clock at night or when you’re overly tired. But that’s a subject for another editorial, and I digress.

As an interim measure, I’ve decided to risk appalling my readers (does either of you really mind?) by changing the look or theme of this site; that is, using this site itself to illustrate themes that I find interesting. That doesn’t mean they’ll be my own themes; it’s going to be a while before I find time for that. Since I became a beginner all over again when I started using Wordpress, I’m still trying to find the time to convert the page designs I originally did for Techismo over to Wordpress themes. I’ve gradually gotten to do enough peeking under the covers of Wordpress to comprehend how I would go about that, but it’s going to take a really sustained bout of creativity to pull it all together, and I don’t anticipate having such uninterrupted stretches of time in the foreseeable future.

So I’ll be selecting new themes such as the one introduced today—Shades of Gray, by Leslie Franke—on a totally arbitrary schedule, then perhaps tweaking or altering it to show how easily it can be customized.

All of which brings me back to something I mentioned in a previous post: the use of the Sandbox theme. As I think I’ve said before, I’d like to convert my original Techismo page designs to work within Sandbox on Wordpress. Oddly enough, a step in that direction is installing Shades of Gray, which is in fact a Sandbox design. That is, Shades of Gray can be installed just like a regular theme once you have the Sandbox theme installed.

As you can see, this is a very cool idea.

So basically, when you install Shades of Gray, all you’re doing is substituting a more sophisticated style sheet for the basic one provided with Sandbox, which relies largely on browser defaults. We haven’t seen those in so long we tend to forget just how ugly they are.

For the moment, I’ve converted this web site to run the Shades of Gray theme (or, more technically, CSS design) just as it is “out of the box.” Someday soon, I’ll replace the default image (a photo of 1911 Akron, Ohio taken from the Library of Congress collection) with something of my own design or choosing (like maybe my original Web Developer’s Notebook header image, if I can still resurrect it from the flotsam and jetsam of my fried laptop hard-drive).

Also, you should be aware that Shades of Gray is one of the 46 CSS designs entered in the Sandbox Designs Competition. The submission deadline for that competition has now passed, but as of this writing, the winners have not been selected yet. There are many other worthy designs that were submitted, so go on over and check it out.

These designs illustrate the beauty and simplicity of providing a Wordpress theme that is readily altered through CSS alone, though it does supply additional horsepower through the class structure provided by the functions. More about that some other time when I’ve had a chance to play with it.

Meanwhile, use the Live Preview feature at the competition site to check out designs you might like to download yourself.

During the design phases of Techismo, for example, I spent a lot of time developing styles in CSS, coding HTML, and perfecting Javascript routines to help me with collapsible menuing systems and navigational themes. When it came time to begin production, I was still tweaking these themes across browsers. Those issues, combined with a little real-life complexity, led me to hold off plans for a launch of what I would call Techismo the magazine, but I did nevertheless pound out an occasional episode of what I think of as Techismo the blog.

Meanwhile, choosing the same blog design for this site quickly proved a form of compromise, given that the originally intended subject was one that lent itself more to a page-oriented developmental approach, since so much of what I planned to discuss was issues in design and implementation of actual, functioning web pages. As detailed in an earlier post, I chose Wordpress as my blog vehicle, and as recent readers of these pages will be well aware, I chose to use the default theme, Kubrick, at least while I learned the ropes.

Of course, the blogs soon took on lives of their own, at least in terms of interests, since I soon found myself reporting on the legal, political and economic issues confronting us as users of technology, whether that technology be the latest in web technologies or streaming music. That was within the pages of Techismo, of course, where I found the vicissitudes of Internet radio a compelling issue in itself, not to mention its ramifications for pieces I had planned and even written on subjects such as streaming radio and hardware devices.

Through all this, my abandoning painstaking page design to become a novice at what I regarded as sort of a page-generator package (Wordpress) was both a source of frustration and of relief. Frustration because I felt removed from the design process that I considered an organic part of writing for the web; relief because it essentially freed me from those frustrations, particularly as they concerned cross-browser compatibility (though not completely) and enabled me at least to focus on writing.

I was delighted therefore, when I began to look around a bit at alternatives that might free me from the self-imposed Wordpress constraints that I had taken on much as a Buddhist monk might declare a vow of chastity. I found a few ready-made themes that held promise, some because they gave me three columns readily, others because they achieved a level of elegance in design itself that was both exhilirating and refreshing.

While I hope to talk about all of these in future installments, for the moment I am delighted to report my experience in the remaking of Health Spectator as a more mature product, at least in its presentation and packaging. So far, for that purpose, I have chosen the theme Feather 1.0 by Andy Mathijs, a Belgian developer with Mindloop, while considering others such as Bob’s Big Blue and Chris Pearson’s Cutline 3-Column Split 1.1; even a few themes from plaintext, such as Scott Allan Warwick’s Barthelme, which you (most likely) see here. I say, most likely because I have been flipping back and forth between Barthelme and Bob’s Big Blue for this site. Barthelme is I think, by far the cooler, while Big Blue gives a genuine 3-column layout and feels customizably homey.

So, for the moment, Health Spectator is stunned out in Feather 1.0 with a few of my own modifications, while this blog and Techismo are heading towards Barthelme. Actually, for Techismo I have been downright experimenting with Sandbox, a cruder-looking quantity right out of the box, but readily customizable just with CSS. I already find myself enchanted.

So however briefly, I’m at least getting to experience the joy again of getting my fingers into the code and making it do what I want, standing on the backs, as I do it, of other good designers.

Not to be confused with categories, tags allow the user great flexibility in organizing content semantically and aid search engines in cataloguing the site.

We recently installed the security upgrade to a couple of our sites without realizing that the due date for version 2.2 was at hand. So we’re going to wait for the release version and do the remaining updates all at once. (Not that Wordpress upgrades aren’t easy–but haven’t you got plenty of other stuff to do?)

The previous release date for 2.2 was supposed to be April 23–just a few days away. It appears that we need only wait at most a few weeks to benefit from the enhanced features that this next major release will provide. Matt is saying “a week or two,” but we’re not holding him to it. Judging by the posts we’ve seen elsewhere, the user community seems unanimous in wanting things done right rather than holding to an arbitrary schedule.

Compare one or two weeks with the delays one expects with Microsoft releases–and these Wordpress guys are volunteers!

I, for one, am willing to wait. I think it’s going to be worth it.

Well, I’ve been planning a website (Techismo) and have been working on it in various capacities for over a year now. I’ve done design work—including coding the usual infuriating hacks and workarounds, because I just cannot accept that it’s gonna look different in IE and possibly others no matter what I do!—planning, conceptualizing, writing, gathering sources and so on.

In some ways, no doubt, I went considerably overboard. For example, I designed an original CSS cum Javascript menuing system that at this rate I may never put to use. (But it sure is purty, and it was an exhilarating challenge to write.)

Meanwhile, I’ve started two blogs (this and Health Spectator) and gotten another website/possibly blog (Spotless Form) partially off the ground. In fact, if I hadn’t fallen in love with an idea for the opening page of Spotless Form that requires consent from a so-far non-responsive Latvian photographer, it would be publicly posted by now. As it is, it may be weeks or months before I actually make pages public, but there’s some copy in the can. Meanwhile, I’ve ordered some original Chinese watercolors that convey the mood I was trying to capture with the photograph. So after some scanning and Photoshop work, I should be ready to go. I’ll redesign the opening page as soon as I have a chance.

So the work goes on.

But what I wanted to talk about here—in keeping with our “what happens while you’re making plans” theme—is that I’ve discovered blogging software. (Yeah, I know—I wasn’t the first.)

Somehow, I now realize, I always thought of using blogging software as a cop-out. Or cheating. Not that I didn’t think it was appropriate for actual bloggers–whom I defined vaguely as people whose primary purpose was news, gossip, or commentary and who were less concerned with visual aesthetics than with message.

Which is to say that I basically knew nothing about it. But with three different sites under construction, I was starting to get desperate.

A lot of that was because I was suddenly presented with situations or news opportunities that actually lent themselves to blogging, or at least a blogging approach. For example, it was difficult to pass up the announcement of Elizabeth Edwards’ cancer relapse as subject matter for Health Spectator. Not as a news announcement per se—it didn’t even occur to me until about a week after the occurrence that this was an opportunity to summarize the latest in cancer knowledge and cures. So a general advice column for those facing either primary or secondary cancer seemed in order, given the national attention the issue had just received.

Next thing I knew, I was working on a blog post to cover this aspect of Health Spectator’s coverage.

Meanwhile, Techismo covers the general beat of music delivery technologies, among many others. Thus, the Copyright Royalty Board’s decision to increase Internet royalties to the point where small, independent Internet radio stations (just the kind we like!) would no longer be able to survive became not just a matter of newsworthiness, but a matter of social responsibility. So I began working on a pre-launch editorial that would inform any readers who stumbled upon my blog.

Urging people to contact their congressmen (congresspeople? yech!) er, congressional representatives and so on seemed like the least I could do. The effort would support an excellent cause, even if reaching instant readership for the piece itself was a longshot.

So next thing I knew, I was investigating blogging software. If you’re in the same position, I can recommend this Blog Software Chart to allow you to compare features across packages. There’s also a similar chart provided by the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review. Or, you can take my word for it and go straight to the Wordpress site.

This is not a full-fledged review, so I’m simply going to let you have a look for yourself (I have nothing at stake here) and tell you that Wordpress does just about everything you could want it to do and is well supported with plugins and extensions. Also, there are several plugins for Mozilla Firefox that allow you to post from your browser. (You do use Firefox, don’t you? If not, click here.)

What’s more, installation is a snap if your web hosting service happens to have a script that does it for you, like mine. All I did was go to my cPanel login, select Fantastico under the heading Plugins/Addons, then select Wordpress from a list of blog software, tell Fantastico where I wanted it installed, and that was it. I was up and running. It actually takes more time to read about it than to do it.

I’ve also since noticed that upgrading will be even simpler. When I clicked through to confirm the exact sequence of steps mentioned above, I found that Fantastico was already telling me that there was a more recent version of Wordpress available and all I have to do is click on the supplied link to install the upgrade. My individual sites are listed in the Fantastico panel with the versions of Wordpress I have installed. Talk about easy!

But just as important for me, Wordpress is free, and that part won’t change. It’s covered by the GNU General Public Licensing agreement, so even if the current band of developers decide to abandon the project, someone else (maybe even you!) can pick it up and run with it. What’s more, since the source code is publicly available, you are free to alter it as you wish (not high on my personal priority list, thank you, but for some this is key!).

Another item not to be overlooked is the wealth of user support for Wordpress. In fact, browsing through the support pages of the Wordpress site, you might easily think you were dealing with a commercial package. Then there’s Lorelle’s site devoted specifically to Wordpress, and so on. The product really has user-community support. There’s even at least one book on the package.

So all in all, if you’re still hand-coding web pages (and God bless you if you are–this site is for you!) but need to crank out a blog as well, Wordpress gets my vote for the way to do it. It’s also versatile enough that you can eventually give up the hand coding if that’s your interest, but if you’re like me, website design can give a sense of hands-on satisfaction not unlike, say, woodworking.

And there’s so much less sawdust.