and He looked upon it and declared it good. But not in a smug kind of way
It’s been a busy night, but hey, I don’t sleep too well by myself and Little Tabby Cat Who Doesn’t Live Here wasn’t leaping on and off the bed making Prrrrttt! noises so it seemed the perfect opportunity to meddle upgrade…
You may know that I’ve had an off/on problem of… infestation on the podcast website?
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been mapping out a cunning plan to stop them pesky varmints from trying to hack the podcast website piss on my bonfire any further.
The plan involved a significant amount of server-side effort which is OK, I can do all of that.
But it also involved a degree of php skills and frankly my php skills are waaaay down the food-chain. I speak better Russian than I speak php. O da tovarisch! Khorosho?
So I enlisted a little friendly help from an even more friendly technical person in Texas who, is not only a php expert but is also an expert in WordPress.
But…
What I didn’t want to happen was to carry out server-side engineering work that would repopulate previously released podcast episodes all over the internet again – because I am sooooo good in the customer care department.
And because people don’t want to be downloading stuff they’ve already listened to, right?
Right!
So last night I:
1. backed up everything on the podcast server
2. pulled back the podcast posts in to edit mode
3. broke the PodPress connections in each post
4. created a hyperlink in each post to the location of the mp3 files
5. republished each post and then, just for good measure
6. backed up the edited posts
Then the friendly technical person in Texas upgraded WordPress from v2.5 to v2.6.1 and remounted the files I’d backed up.
This morning while eating breakfast I reinstalled the Beautiful Sunrise theme that – to me at least – has been a kind of design feature of the podcast website.
The end result of all this technical trickery is that not only has the website (hopefully!) been patched against hackers but the RSS feed has been preserved against unwanted replication of previously released podcasts. And yet the previously released podcasts still exist within clickable/downloadable hyperlinks in each podcast episode post.
Yay us!
I have been considering a longer-term design change that would deliver a bunch more functionality and would offer the website the ability to become more magazine-ish rather than the single source of output that it currently is.
I do have an illustration of the kind of base template I’m thinking of using: http://www.revolutiontheme.com/music/
Anyone have any thoughts or feelings on any of these things? Good? Bad? Indifferent?
B.
Hmmm… I quite like the Revolution template.
But.
I think it would end up being a LOT of work on your part, keeping it updated and fresh every week.
And we don’t want your blog (or the podcast itself) to suffer as a result. Do we? [rhetorical]
I suppose you could always do a trial run for a few weeks to see how it goes and revert back if you find it takes up too much drinking time.
Out of the mouth of babes… Masher Me Mucker you are right of course. Time is the Olde Enemie. And no, I wouldn’t have Time for such a Grande Adventure – def not on the scope outlined by the Revolution template. But I am kind of sort of half maybe three-quarters playing with the idea of dropping a load of that functionality and encouraging other folk to write their own features/reviews/whatever.
Drinking time? Are you implying that I have such a thing as drinking time? 🙂 Young whippersnapper! 🙂