After about two months of preparatory effort, I released my blog site today. I have been keeping a diary chronicle of this site called "Preparing to Blog" that I will soon compile into one major tutorial for PDF download.
For reasons noted on the other ‘Preparing …’ posts, this is the one entry that is actually conterminous with the site release. All other entries are about one-month delayed.
The actual site release was a bit more laborious than I first would have thought, though most of the effort arose from my recording and changing dates than due to actual release posting demands. Nonetheless, these were the efforts I needed to complete for the final unveiling:
- Update the entire site to WordPress release 1.5.1.3, reportedly necessary for security updates and because of some trackback implementation issues (see later)
- Complete all open postings; there were about four of these carried over from earlier posts. I need to continue to remind myself to post and "document as you go" rather than these difficult reachback efforts
- I needed to change the date stamps on all ‘Preparing …‘ posts and put the standard author’s note at the end of each. Though not strictly demanding, these efforts actually took about 3-4 hours because of the delays in post updates noted earlier (I commit to track down this problem; it is totally unacceptable)
- The site domain needed to be changed from the termporary IP that had been used to mkbergman.com, which led to the next set of problems
- Switchover of URLs and internal links needed to be checked and confirmed
- Add the actual ping sites used in my options (see this posting for the reference)
- All efforts charts and total time estimates also needed to be updated (not necessary except to support my own documentary demands).
Version 1.5.1.3 Update
Below is a list of the updated files, following the same steps as indicated in the David Russell blog. Because he was going from v1.5.1.2 to v1.5.1.3 he only had to upgrade 6 files. For us to go from v1.5.1 to 1.5.1.3 we had to upgrade 16 files:
/wp-admin/quicktags.js
/wp-content/themes/default/header.php
/wp-includes/functions-post.php
/wp-includes/functions.php
/wp-includes/pluggable-functions.php
/wp-includes/template-functions-category.php
/wp-includes/template-functions-general.php
/wp-includes/template-functions-links.php
/wp-includes/template-functions-post.php
/wp-includes/version.php
/wp-includes/wp-db.php
/readme.html
/wp-blog-header.php
/wp-login.php
/xmlrpc.php
Nonetheless, these final tweaks were achieved, and the site finally went live at about 10:30 am CDT.
Author’s Note: I actually decided to commit to a blog on April 27, 2005, and began recording soon thereafter my steps in doing so. Because of work demands and other delays, the actual site was not released until July 18, 2005. To give my ‘Prepare to Blog …’ postings a more contemporaneous feel, I arbitrarily changed posting dates on this series one month forward, which means some aspects of the actual blog were better developed than some of these earlier posts indicate. However, the sequence and the content remain unchanged. A re-factored complete guide will be posted at the conclusion of the ‘Prepare to Blog …’ series, targeted for release about August 18, 2005. mkb
