Seeing as the site had it’s birthday yesterday, it seemed a good time to do some maintenance on the old bird. Since Bishop never got around to it, I went ahead and updated the underlying WordPress installation up to the newest version, as well as the current theme (and in the process, re-enabled the Show Author functionality that had been broken for a while and had gone unnoticed!).
On a related note, I noticed that after my hard work, the site looked rather garbled in Internet Explorer 8. The “Compatibility Mode” button was also not showing, but the workaround to get the site looking normal is to simply add Guildcom.us to the Compatibility view list on the Compatibility View Settings under Tools on the normally hidden menu bar (which can be brought up by simply pressing the Alt key) or under Page on the command bar. This seemed to fix things right up. Opera 10 displayed fine from the get-go, and although I haven’t tested them yet, I assume Firefox 3.5+ and Chrome ought to work fine as well.
Today, GuildCom turns two years old. Wow, it’s kinda hard to believe. And recently, Bishop coughed up the needed wampum out of the barren Guild coffers to keep us going another year. 
Here’s to two years running, and hopefully many more to come! 
This just in! GuildCom’s story from April 1st was, once again, squelched by a government conspiracy to keep us quiet!
We’ll have to find a way to get the news out without being shot. In the meantime, keep tuned in here to get all the latest updates.
Actually, we’ve had way more than 999 spam comments, but our plugin has now prevented us from having to deal with 999 of them.
I’d have waited 5 minutes for it to grab another, but I think 999 is a way more interesting number than 1k.
Also, Scorp, you’re still leaving out spaces between italic/obliquetext and the text that follows it. It’s not that I give a crap — just that I’m curious about how it happens, because I know you’re not apt to do it on purpose. I wonder if it’s an IE thing?
Yes, yes, yes, I know I did exactly the same thing above.
You may note this is the first time that the tag “security” has been used on our site. Not that we don’t give a crap about security, but we just don’t seem [the remainder of this sentence has been deleted for the sake of good luck].
Apparently some people using WordPress have been getting hacked. Basically, it involves a file called remv.php in the content/themes folder of the WordPress installation. Why? …well, there are some basic, unfortunate facts involved here:
- If a technology is popular, it will be attacked; the potential benefit of attacking a technology increases significantly with popularity.
- A technology like WordPress, without central control, can be more vulnerable to attack; some lazy bastards just don’t keep things up to date.
Before you ask, Scorpio, we have not been victims of this and — as far as I know — we are not vulnerable to this specific attack, as we aren’t using the right version of WordPress (an older version).
Anyway, what this highlights for me is something I’ve discovered in browsing around over the last week (mostly doing theme research): a lot of people are using old-ass versions of WordPress!
Not just people like Aunt Jane or Uncle Tommy, but people like Ford Motor Company. Obviously there’s no rule against this and often as not in Corporate America it’s standard practice not to fix (upgrade) what isn’t broken (because upgrading might break it), but holy sheebus…
In looking around, believe it or not, I have seen versions of WordPress in use on live sites that are older than the one we had when we started using WordPress.
It reminds me of that Hershey’s commercial: change is bad, huh?
Not sure why this kind of stuff still surprises me.
In light of the new year the Guild is continuing its recent project, the primary goal of which is to explore the limits of what can and can’t be done with WordPress (on our budget) and to — eventually — come up with a new theme for the website.
To that end, we may be switching themes periodically through the month of January. Comments appreciated (though not necessarily comments about color schemes; it is expected that many of these will be less than optimal).
Feel free to view the theme online at dev.guildcom.us, which I found to be quite tasteful. Line length for the main content is a little on the long side, but not untenable; this may in fact be related to a phantom widget bar which seems to be MIA, at least in the installation at the dev site. Updates expected when I figure out what the hell is going on.
Also, expect random sentences to be quoted just so I can see what quotes look like.
And maybe nested quotes?
The theme now installed on the main page (if you’re viewing this post in an archive, that theme has almost assuredly disappeared) has a few interesting features. Click on this post’s title to see what I mean.
bishop.guildcom.us actually has something posted at it now.
Over the next few weeks I’ll be testing the limits of what I can and can’t figure out (not of what can and can’t be done) with WordPress in terms of having it act more as a CMS than as a blog. I know the arguments against doing that, but none of them are nearly good enough to make up for the two arguments I have for doing it:
- WordPress is dirt simple.
- I almost understand how WordPress works.
The test site in question is ten-sins.org, the website for the Guild’s official presence in [game that shall not be named because the merest mention of it attracts assloads of spam comments]. Next to nothing is posted there at this point and it’s using the same theme as the main GuildCom site, but at least one of those problems should be fixed soon.
To those of you who had invested time in the Joomla version of the guild website, I apologize for the sudden switch and the inconvenience (and the necessity of recreating your user accounts, etc.). I don’t believe any actual content was lost, but if so I ask that you be forgiving. Don’t be afraid to create a new account and drop me a line; I won’t be destroying the world again. [Insert pretty rainbow.]
I wonder how many posts on this site are named “Updates” or some variation thereof.
Everything is now categorized again and (for the most part) tagged, too. You can even browse the site via a “tag cloud,” found now on the lower right hand side.
The Page interface needs some work, but otherwise I’ve hacked things out so that this new theme is functional. That said, I would like to direct your attention to the horizontal navigation menu at the top of this space. You will note the presence of our primary categories there.
Like it? If not, GTFO; I don’t care.
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