public service announcement: update your plugins and your About/FAQ pages

Charles Ainsworth playing cards inside cabin at 60 Above on Sulphur Creek, Yukon Territory

I am tidying up here because it is just starting to feel like Autumn and I was looking at a friend’s website and realizing that not only was their About page out of date, it had them living in the wrong country. Now, for a lot of people a personal website is basically just that, personal. For me since I sometimes solicit or receive work through librarian.net I figured I’d maybe do a little tidying, look professional, that sort of thing. So I updated my about page, am reading through the FAQ, made sure WordPress was up to date and updated my plugins. I also disabled the theme switcher which was a fun thing when I wanted to have four different looking versions of this site, but I’m not feeling that way any more. Apologies to people who enjoyed the other themes. Next on the to do list is getting my Talks page a little more streamlined. I don’t think it has to be an eight year list of talks I’ve given and it’s not really sending the message I want.

So, just a little inward-facing user experience stuff and a reminder that to many people our web presence is an awful lot of what they know about us. May want to make sure it’s looking okay. Otherwise I’m trying to relax in the spirit of the Virgo Month of Leisure and get ready for my teaching and drop-in time to start which is happening next week. The cooler winds are starting to blow in and I am ready to start hunkering down.

librarian.net is rocking wordpress 2.3

Hi. I upgraded to WordPress 2.3 today because I just noticed a bug in the tagging plug-in I was using which means that any time I approved a comment for a particular post, the tags associated with that post vanished. Pretty weird huh? WordPress 2.3 has native tag support which means no more wonky plugin/WP interactions. It also has — hidden in the manage > import > section — a tag importer that will either import your tags from popular tag plugins or import your categories as tags. This is all good news. I managed to do the entire thing in about 20 minutes including adding tags to my current template, adding the tag cloud, downloading new versions of a few other plug-ins, and re-doing the little hacks I always make to my WordPress install including a custom stylesheet, removal of all the extra cruft from the dashboard, and pulling in a del.icio.us feed of the “addme” tag into my now blank dashboard area. Here are a few links that were helpful to me in doing this upgrade

another wordpress update

I seem to have found a comment form that works; thanks to everyone for their advice and suggestions. I have also used a slightly modified version of the sociable plugin to add tiny links beneath each post so that you can socially bookmark any of them via del.icio.us, digg or co.mments. Sociable supports a lot of social bookmarking services, but in the interests of keeping the icon-noise level down, I started with the three that I use. Are there other sites that are listed on the Sociable page that you use often? As always, you can track when I’m using for my WordPress install on the wordpress mods page.