A New Look, And Most Of It Works

December 10, 2013 by Dave Haynes

For the last few weeks I have been fiddling with a new look for this blog – one that’s very reminiscent of my old newspaper days. With a center masthead, “earlug” graphics to each side, and a big top ad banner.

It was supposed to go live this weekend, but the guy helping me … well … didn’t. So it went up tonight, and after a few blind panic episodes, the version I had tweaked like crazy on the staging site crossed the digital chasm to the live site. For a few minutes, ALL I had was a vast screen of white. Like a midwest blizzard. Not good.

So, there’s some weird WordPress stuff going on in which stuff that worked just fine before is not working at all now. If I turn on a very handy tool called Jetpack, I get the all white screen. The result … some of the shiny new things I added are now in the coming soon category.

You will likely see some weird stuff if you dig into the older posts, as what looks fine in one WordPress theme doesn’t always look fine using another theme. I noticed the block quotes thing I have used a bit lately goes apeshit, for example, with this new design.

Oh well. It will get sorted.

Calls and emails will go out in the morning and over the next few days we’ll get things fully sorted. My grand experiment in working slowly and deliberately on a staging site, and then seamlessly going live, didn’t work so well.

Think I’ll now bid for work on the US government’s Health Care site.