Why I Didn’t Post Much in February
“Hey Ryan, where’d you go?”
I received that question a week ago from a regular reader.
And I felt it deserved an answer.
February was an extremely busy month. I was working on multiple copy projects, some of which I thought would be complete in January, but extended well into February.
On top of that, I didn’t work a single Wednesday in February. That’s because I’d committed to putting one of my sons in half-day ski lessons at Winter Park. So every Wednesday I was snowboarding at Winter Park while my son learned how to ski.
And then I decided to write my first Kindle ebook as part of a 4-week class I signed up for. I’m nearly done with the ebook, and it will be for sale on Amazon soon.
But I guess all that wasn’t enough for an already-busy month.
I also decided to migrate this site from HostMonster (which I’ve never been happy with) to WPEngine hosting for WordPress.
I had been planning to make the move for a few months, but it was a fascinating case study on Quick Sprout (and a fast-approaching two-year hosting account renewal) that pushed me to take action sooner than later.
The migration process took me a couple of weeks since I decided to do the migration myself. I’ve never migrated a WordPress site before, so there was a learning curve. Yet I was still surprised how easy the process was.
My hope is that my site will load more quickly and that some of the inerrant behavior my site displayed on HostMonster will be gone for good.
So, is my site faster now? If it’s not, please lie to me so that I will feel good about my decision.
You may note that certain items that were once in my sidebar are now gone. For example, the most popular posts list has departed for the Elysian fields of outer-cyberspace. I do not know if the list will ever come back.
One of the things that intrigued me about WPEngine was their focus on speed. In fact, they have a list of disallowed plugins, a few of which I was running on my blog.
The post views and similar posts plugins I’d been using are both on WPEngine’s disallowed list. Apparently these plugins (and a few others) put an undue burden on the server.
Anyway, all of those offenders have been removed from service.
The next thing I plan to do is research new WordPress themes. I’m still running Thesis 1.8 and have not upgraded to 2.0. I’m currently investigating whether there are better alternatives (feel free to make a suggestion in the comments).
In the past I’ve been hesitant to try out new themes due to the likelihood of me breaking a whole bunch of stuff on my site. But WPEngine has a staging area where you can do all your dirty work before going live. I’m eager to use this new feature.
So to get back to the question that started this post, that’s where I’ve been: writing copy for clients, snowboarding at Winter Park, writing a Kindle ebook, and migrating my site to a new host.
Look for new posts soon.
-Ryan M. Healy