Here’s to WordPress

I’m pretty much over my flu (or whatever it was), other than the fact that I’m very wheezy, and moving around too much makes me cough for ages. The good news is that my cough seems to have left my chest, which means it’s not painful…just annoying.

The battle with WordPress continues. The problem is that I keep getting random 404s for pages in the admin panel, and there’s no consistency at all with where and when I’m getting them. It did get to the stage where I literally couldn’t access certain pages at all. And I’ve trawled the web for advice, and tried various different things. One of them has at least improved the situation, and the 404s are much less frequent (but still annoying). I was hoping a WP update would fix the problem, but the most recent one hasn’t. Sigh.

I know a lot of people are moving away from WP, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. Nothing provides as much functionality, is as versatile, as well-supported or just plain good as WP. Way back when, I used Greymatter (another popular choice at the time), then Movable Type, but WordPress has been a massive jump forward. Even the haters have to admit it’s been useful for other developers to be inspired and, quite simply, the blog community just wouldn’t be the same without it. It’s not perfect. But I know I’m a million times more likely to figure out a solution to my problem than if I were using some obscure platform or struggling with my own code. Plus, with WP, I can make my site do exactly what I want it to do. I’ll be happy when I finally get this issue fixed

Anyway. My attempts to get the homepage of blossom going directly to the blog ended up being successful…but that meant my spam plugin stopped working. I found out a few hours later when I logged in to about 30 spam comments. So I installed something that’s working really well now, and the plus side is there’s no more maths question to answer when you try to post a comment Interestingly enough, my site stats are now also much more accurate. I feel considerably less depressed, because, as it turns out, I’m getting several hundred more unique visitors a day than were being counted previously. Plus, the search engines are ranking my site better and my SEO score is 99%. So at least something is going right!

I’m putting the finishing touches to the Adobe tutorials, and every time I edit a page to add something or change some code, I think of something else I need to do *sigh* My new plan is to spend an hour or so every day working on the site. So far it’s going pretty well; although I’d like to be spending more time on it, at least I feel I’m getting somewhere.

Work’s been busy for me as Apple have just launched new products and updates…meaning I’m spending all day writing all about them. I’ve been moved about all over the place recently because there have been a lot of people in and out, and they are still figuring out how to rearrange everyone. At the moment I’m sitting with a couple of my friends, and I’ve managed to grab some shiny new stuff for my desk/workspace (keyboard with lovely keys, nice widescreen display, great leather chair) so it’s all good. Still really enjoying my new job

This weekend is mine and Joe’s second anniversary together. I’m not mentioning what I’ve bought because I know he’ll be reading this! It’s his turn to plan what we do, and I’m looking forward to being surprised I just hope the weather’s nice and/or there’s a chance to take great photos. Sunday night is Dawn’s birthday thing, so we’re going to go to that, and Tabi will be here, yay! Then next weekend is halloween – I’m planning to take a half day off work on the Friday because Hannah’s coming to stay and we’re going to go costume shopping. I’ve seen some great killer heels I want, though I haven’t thought about my costume yet. Friday night is fondue night (and probably a film), then Saturday will be shopping/wii. Saturday evening my friends have rented a pub, and then I want to go on into town to the gothic bar, where it will be super halloween-y.

At the moment I’ve been quite into making milkshakes. I originally bought my blender for smoothies, but access to frozen fruit (much cheaper and easier to store) is limited at the moment, and it’s pretty cold out. Also, too much fruit was sore for my throat. So I’ve been making strawberry milkshakes which basically consist of fresh strawberries, semi-skimmed milk, a small scoop of light vanilla ice cream, and some Nesquik milkshake powder all blended together until frothy. Nice and soothing, and not too unhealthy.