One of the big reasons I wanted to put all of the alexking.org content into WordPress was because I’d found that I’d begun putting almost everything into the blog rather than other areas of the site. It wasn’t a conscious decision, it was just so much easier to update the blog than the other pages in the site.
This shift was a bit of a practical problem because there are other areas of my site that need updating on a regular basis. For example, my various project pages that need updating on each release, etc. At times I would actually delay releasing something that was done and ready just because I didn’t have time or easy SFTP access.
As I’ve already touched on briefly, the transition of all of the site content into the WordPress database gave me a number of benefits (more on this in the next installment), one of the big benefits was the ability to easily update the site from a web interface.
That wasn’t the only change I made though, I finally did for alexking.org what I’d done for kingdesign.net a while ago, put the entire site in SVN. This makes it easy for me to test local changes and push them to the site as well as push changes I make live on the site back into a local test environment. It also means that the site is backed up to S3 along with the rest of my SVN repositories.
These may sound like small changes, but they are fundamental to the way I manage this site. If you’re finding yourself reluctant to make changes on one of your web sites, ask yourself: Self, is your web site maintenance toolset holding you back?
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Jonathan adds this Comment:
I actually found this post via a link from wordpress.org. I have read some interesting ideas, and issues I’ll consider when next redesigning my site.
I wanted to read all of the articles in the series, but had to look through your whole archive to find each one. Could you add a mechanism to allow a series of articles to be followed easily? The grey box at the top of part one could be updated to provide links to all the other parts.
February 22nd, 2007 at 6:23 am
Alex adds this Comment:
Maybe you could click on the “series of posts” link in the grey box then click on each of the articles in the list there. A nice menu of the posts in this series is provided for you, you just have to use it.
February 22nd, 2007 at 12:04 pm
Jonathan adds this Comment:
Sorry, you are quite right! I didn’t register that they were links to the different parts as the link text doesn’t say “Part 2″, etc. In fact, I think I saw part 2 first. Anyway, I’ll look forward to the final two parts.
February 22nd, 2007 at 4:06 pm
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April 18th, 2007 at 10:53 am