I think I upgraded this website successfully. More to the point, I believe I successfully updated the RSS feed, which was the only real point of difficulty. During the process of attempting to get the new RSS feed working a number of erroneous posts were sent to the feed. A little embarrassing to blast my readership with my errors, but all in all it went as well as I could have hoped.
So, I now present to you all Silverware Thief 5.0.
The summarized history of this website is as follows:
- On April 2, 2003 this website was brought into the world with my first post(1). That was Silverware Thief 1.0 (as I call it now) and I’ve been going at it ever since.
- In late January or February 2004 I implemented my first real design (previously the site has sported a very spartan layout) at which the fork made its appearance. This design was bland but nonetheless was my first distinctive design and I still find something appealing in its simplicity. That was Silverware Thief 2.0.
- At the end of March-beginning of April 2005 I upgraded my site back-end software from MoveableType 3.15 to WordPress 1.4 and also unveiled a new design–a more sophisticated appearance with the black and white silverware and pen photograph header. That was Silverware Thief 3.0.
- In May 2007 I unveiled Silverware Thief 4.0. At that point I upgraded to the WordPress 2.1 series for back-end website management and refined and tweaked my previous design, the primary visual change being from a two column layout to a three column presentation. I had great plans(2) for the revamped website, most of which did not come to be–at least not on the scale I dreamed.
- This brings us to the end of October 2008 and the launch of Silverware Thief 5.0. While the basic look of the website has remained, I have made the text area wider to take advantage of the screen space provided by larger monitors and also have switched back to a two column layout for the present. By far the biggest change is in the back-end, where I switched to WordPress MU 2.6.3(3). This was primarily to make the maintenance and development of this website easier for me, though I hope the fresh organization will be easier for readers to navigate also.
At the time of this writing, Silverware Thief 5.0 still has rough edges. I have theme application I still need to do, and if I can find the time I really need to go back and update the links that were broken in my old posts by the upgrade. There will be future fine-tuning, but the majority of the work is done.
For the technically curious (such as those who maintain their own blog) I may write a post or two about some of the hurdles I had to overcome in this upgrade. But for right now the website is working, and that is enough.
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(1) http://silverwarethief.com/letters/2003/04/02/calf-hunting/
(2) http://silverwarethief.com/letters/2007/05/07/silverware-thief-40/
(3) http://mu.wordpress.org/