Playing to Strengths

The hardest thing to work is almost always your weakness. My weakness has historically been design where I end up wasting countless hours trying to do something relatively simple to have it come out looking, well, not so great. This is the kind of thing that I’d happily pay (reasonably) to come up with a solution I could live with. For site layouts that could mean finding a great layout on a free site such as Open Source Web Design , buying a coded layout from the millions of template sites like Template Monster , buying a unique layout from a forum, hiring a designer or having a design contest . To me any of these are better than doing it myself in the end. Although the technical knowledge isn’t incredibly hard to grasp the code of a layout, getting everything just right is a skill I just do not have, which is why I decided to go with an already coded template for the redesign of AdamFortuna.com . It was finally time to upgrade to WordPress 2.1.2 while at it as well. Since I host at Dreamhost , this was easier than easy. They have a growing set of “One Click Installers” in the revamped control panel, which also manage which version of each software you’re using. Upgrading was as easy as clicking here, jumping to the wordpress install script to do the database updates, and crossing my fingers. Although I had backups at hand, it worked without a glitch. My themes were transferred, my plugins continued to work, it was shockingly easy. A few plugins didn’t work right off though, such as the coding markup when posting which disappeared, but the major plugins continued to function such as a tag warrior, MicroID, OpenID, Google Analytics and Feed Burner redirect. Hopefully that’s the last of the upgrade problems for now though.