Maintenance

I’ve always been a fan of a more plain view, and so yesterday, finding myself in front of my Mac on a weekend without a bulging to-do list (or, rather, without a desire to attack a bulging to-do list), I decided to change the look of this blog. I’m currently using a theme called plaintxtblog. I modified the colors of this blog to the current “light on dark” palette, as I like that more than the brightness of white. I like the much-more-text-centric look of the blog now. I think one of the primary impetuses for the change was that I really didn’t like the blog layout before. It obviously was a good design (I’m not saying that because I’m taking any credit: K2 and Sapphire obviously did all the heavy lifting for me).

At the same time, I’ve done a few things on the backend. I downloaded a plugin called WP Security Scan, which pointed out a few places I could tighten security. I downloaded another that will let me instantly upgrade my install when WordPress rolls out a new version — this is a nice thing for me, as manual installs are really rather boring.

I also did some work changing how the site looks in Google, via its Webmaster Tools. I removed a lot of month archive pages which had been indexed from the site, and were essentially showing up as duplicated content. (The more duplicated content you have indexed, the more Google doesn’t like it.) I made sure that if a page is missing, Google doesn’t index it (at the moment, it is, because the error page in the old theme wasn’t returning a “404″ code). I also changed the “meta description” so it’ll show an excerpt from the post. (Although at the moment, it’s broken, because it’s showing an old tagline.)

For a little bit, my website was pointing towards a personal wiki I keep, thanks to a misconfiguration. I’m hoping that a password scheme kept most of it from the public, although nothing was particularly awfully private; just notes and such.

Of course, I doubt most people care about this, but I thought I’d say it. I actually tend to think that this blog really doesn’t have any regular readers, although I know a few articles have semi-entered the blogosphere.

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