Sour Swinger Predominantly follows my Army & Iraq Deployment. Also has some Geek, School, and other talk.

A couple weeks ago, I decided to revamp my entire blog in preparation for my deployment. I’ll admit, I’ve been very lazy over the past couple months when its come to my blog. Hell I’ve been lazy in most everything because I know I’m up for a year of hard work with the Army. With time finally winding down, I’ve kicked myself into gear.

First change has been the automatic emailing system. Now anyone who registers with my site will receive an email notifying them of a new Army post. I figured many people are yet to utilize RSS and this provides a nice alternative. It also eases my life. I had a mass emailing list that I would always manually send out. Now everything is handled automatically.

Next big change has been my theme. It took many hours of searching until I found something I liked. Since my focus is changing to Army, I wanted a more legit looking design. My old green Cordobo had flare but with a name like Sour Swinger, I’d need to work at making myself seem more professional. Of course, the theme wasn’t perfect and required a lot of manual tweaking. Theme design was simpler then I thought. Perhaps at the end of my tour, I’ll create one from the ground up. Most notable custom change has been a dynamic post footer. All Army posts will include a ‘Register with the site” link. Ones involving video will include links to my YouTube and Vimeo accounts. All other Army posts will include links to my pictures.

I’ve added a few more plugins. DiggZ adds a digg icon at the beginning of all my posts. I’ve finally added SEO and also added a global translator. Probably will attract more foreign traffic once I officially blog from Iraq. To further help traffic that doesn’t utilize RSS, I’ve included a plugin that enables email notifications of follow up comments to posts. I also found a plugin that automatically updates wordpress. Already used it once and boy does it make the process easier.

Which brings up the last change. I updated my blog to 2.6.2. Haven’t notice any real change, though I notice that FREAKING LOGIN BUG STILL EXISTS!

I actually did this a week ago but wanted to wait and see what changes I noticed. None. Wordpress stated they will begin doing more incremental updates for minor bugs. So its not totally necessary to make the updates. With 2.6 came an annoying bug where your login information is not stored and/or access correctly when selecting “remember me”. So every time I load the admin page, I have to enter my username and password. Unfortunately 2.6.1 did not fix this and I must continue to wait.

Updated the blog. Check this site out for all the details on what the update fixes.

Wordpress released a new update and I was quick to update my blog.  There has been one nagging bug in which images are automatically reset to left alignment when switching between Visual and HTML editor.  In fact, I can only center align images via the HTML editor.  If I switch back to to Visual, it actually deletes my center tags.  This update claims to have fixed over 70 bugs.  Unfortunately, it did not fix the only bug I could seem to find.  I’ll just have to continue adding images in HTML editor after writing the post in the Visual editor.

Wordpress 2.5 was released and all I can say is…WOW!  They really overhauled Wordpress and made it Web 2.0.  The admin console has been totally redone with theme and layout.  I can custom design the layout and theme more easily.  It also adds better support for tags.  I used to need a plugin, which wasn’t all that great, that allowed me to do mass tag editing and so forth.  With the update done, it looks like I won’t need that plugin any more.  The visual editor has also been redone.  They claim it won’t mess with your code any more.  That was always a big issue with me.  The old editor gave me so many problems that I simply turned it off and wrote out the HTML code by hand.  The old editor would never be consistent and would always change the code around.  Will have to play around a bit and see if its finally better.  So far I love this update and look forward to trying it out some more.  Check out this site for all the details on the update.

I’m sure no one will agree with the decision but I’ve decided to add some advertisements onto my blog.  I tried my best to keep it as non-intrusive as possible.  Just a list of links on the right panel, and a Google search bar at the top.  I figure if at least one person clicks on it in a month, it’ll be worth it.  Hoping I can get something to offset the cost of the web space and server.  Let me know what yous think.

Six days ago, version 2.3.3 for wordpress was released. It included a security fix for those that allowed blog registration, which I happen to have enabled. Apparently a malicious user could use a specially designed request to actual edit any online post. Now the question is, did someone see the potential for that or did it already occur frequently enough to get reported? Either way, I’m sure it took a lot of time to figure it out.