The Woes of WordPress
Since converting back to WordPress I’ve been having some difficulties with my site. It’s not the fault of WordPress per se (I just liked the sound of the title) but rather my inefficient system, and my impatience.
In my haste to get the live WP install up and running, I temporarily dropped some of the functionality from my website. While this was convenient in theory, it has totally screwed the Google bot from here to the moon and back, and now Google webmaster tools is telling me:
That’s 3,703 errors — 404 errors to be exact — caused by deleted folders/pages, and a missing FAQ system. This mass of problems has caused my rankings (not PageRank, but ranking for individual keywords) to drop through the floor. :(
I added back my questions script today, albeit in the form of a rather dodgy (private) WordPress plugin executed through Exec-PHP rather than done “properly”. If you caught my blog during the addition of my first go earlier, you may have seen the first 15 questions from the database appearing in place of every post, link, archive, etc. That’s why it’s being executed through Exec-PHP :P
In an attempt to combat the dwindling result rankings — a bit of a sticking plaster until Google gets its arse into gear and re-indexes my new structure — I’ve added the Google XML Sitemaps Generator (so that I don’t have to do it manually).
The default IP look-up for WP comments sent to my inbox also sucks, so that’s something else I’ve changed. (pluggable.php line 788 – change http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput= to http://www.geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm?GetLocation&ipaddress= )
I’ve still got over 50 posts “Uncategorised”, and I need to edit the dates on older, imported pages to more accurately reflect the time they were published. There’s a handful of themes yet to be added back too, although I’m beginning to hate not having a styleswitcher (time to write a plugin for it?)
So apart from all that whining, I’m still pleased with the move. No mysql connection errors as yet!
Josh said:
On 20 Apr at 7:50 pm
Good luck! At least the efforts you describe are worthwhile.
Since you’ve converted, the search box seems to have vanished into thin air. Is there any chance you could squeeze re-adding it into your busy schedule. (I’m using the “Mint Chocolate” theme, it appears to be there in the other one.)
Jem said:
On 20 Apr at 7:55 pm
It’s on my to-do list Josh, thanks for reminding me :)
Raina said:
On 20 Apr at 8:04 pm
Just out of curiosity: why did you switch back to WordPress from your own CMS? :)
TWD said:
On 20 Apr at 8:11 pm
The post she linked to in the first line explains, Raina ^_^
“…For about 6-8 months now I’ve been having problems with my website increasingly maxing out its MySQL max_connection limit. Originally I thought this was a symptom of my own popularity (heehee) but bloggers with similar stats weren’t having my problem…”
Hannah said:
On 20 Apr at 8:11 pm
Is the ask form supposed to be missing from the “Ask a Question” page? Just wondering ;3
SarahG said:
On 20 Apr at 8:17 pm
There should already be a style switcher plugin for wordpress as far as I’m aware.
Kachii said:
On 20 Apr at 9:47 pm
I’m dabbling with the new WordPress now (yes, I’m thinking about bringing back Kachii.com in the next months) and it has been causing me a few problems – probably because I want to use it as a fully functional CMS and not just a blogging system (including sidebar widgets, plugins and all that jazz) and I don’t think it’s particularly well written or constructed. It’s not very friendly to outsider code monkeys prone to compulsive tweaking. That said, WordPress never has been suitable for that since it succeeded b2 (which I still believe was the greatest blogging system ever invented). At any rate, I should get there eventually, I just need to take my time over it instead of trying to get everything working simultaneously within the space of a few hours.
Simply put, I feel your pain. I’m now trying to write out a desired website structure before I go any further with my messing.
Carly said:
On 20 Apr at 10:29 pm
I love that google xml sitemap generator, great isn’t it?
In fact, I love wordpress in general… Not sure if I am too keen on 2.5’s admin panel though, I prefer the colours of it, but I think I like how the prior versions were set out.
Is there any way you could add the old version of your FAQ as a plug in, or perhaps a non-wordpress part of the site? Like it looks the same, but it’s not wordpress. I dunno how these things work really, that sounds like a cheating way of doing it, lol.
Well, hope you manage to fix it all up soon..!
Vickie said:
On 21 Apr at 4:12 am
I missed your typo reporter, thought I’d send an email but saw your eenie meenie delete aside. Right now you’re linking Calm Banana as Clam Banana; not sure if it’s a typo or actually an in-joke, but that mixed with caffeine in the bloodstream sent me into a giggle fit somehow. Heh.
Chans said:
On 21 Apr at 8:14 am
I’m using a wordpress theme switcher by Ryan Boren so there already is one available for WP.
I really like using wordpress but I don’t have everything in wordpress, quiet a few pages are non-wordpress pages and it seems to work OK.
Jem said:
On 21 Apr at 8:30 am
@Chans: theme switcher and style switcher are not the same thing (I already have Ryan’s theme switcher)
Rise said:
On 21 Apr at 11:45 am
I’ve just been looking through your site, and I was so excited to see that Neopets was where it all started for ya. It’s where I started out. I would probably have only recently (since MySpace became big) found out about HTML and the likes if it weren’t for Neopets and the guilds. Heh.
Ashley said:
On 22 Apr at 1:01 am
Wow, that’s a few errors you’ve got there. I really don’t know much about Page Ranking. That stuff has flew over my head in the past. I’m sure you’ve got some posts or articles around here that explain it all. ;)
Jenny said:
On 22 Apr at 3:03 pm
oh wow I didn’t even know you were using WordPress. Coolness. What made you switch?
Neo said:
On 09 May at 9:58 am
Its always a pain to switch, but I’m a huge fan of WP, grats on the switch
wonkotsane said:
On 19 May at 2:25 pm
I need to take the plunge and upgrade from WordPress 2.0.x to the latest version. Trouble is, I’ve butchered it to the extent that moving will be a fairly moderate amount of work so I need to run two installs in parallel until I’m done modifying and WordPress won’t upload a wxr file greater than 2mb. Mine is 5.3mb. Feel sorry for me, somebody!