Happy Commenting!

Once again, I have realized why I am receiving no comments. I am requiring users to register before they can make comments. But I as an admin have to manually approve these registrations–which I have not been doing–I haven’t even been receiving the email! So I have disabled the registration requirement and just let akismet take care of things. Hope that will be enough.

In another note, I am managing a series of wordpress upgrades. I’ve been falling behind on my upgrades…to the point where it’s driving me crazy. So I have created a set of procedures which I can follow every time I upgrade. Already I can tell this is going to save me oodles of time.

I’m also having to manage the upgrade of teleread which is very tricky. One reason is that the site serves a lot of content; it also uses a lot of plugins and a different version of wordpress. For this reason, I really need to do an in-place upgrade (where I install over files rather than installing in a separate directory while the site remains live and then switching the URLs when I’m sure it works well).

In place upgrades are scary. What if you mess up? Then you’re left with a heap of nothing. However, I think I’m getting the hang of it. Update: While upgrading teleread’s site, I learn from the site’s main editor/writer that he’d been making a series of modifications to the theme to accomodate several plugins. That was fine, except I had absolutely no idea he had done this and been vainly trying to troubleshoot why the main page wasn’t working properly when plugins were being deactivated. I had several bad experiences with upgrading/migrating that site, and the editor forgot to mention to me what he’d done. In  technical writing (as well as system administration) it’s easy to encounter these “gaps in knowledge” and be totally flummoxed by it.  In technical writing, the challenge is not the writing part (that’s easy); it’s stumbling upon those details that the expert views as obvious or not worth mentioning.

Update: Two days and still no comments!  Come on guys! Do I need to add some photos of hot babes or start complaining about Iraq or rail against copyright again?