Apollo Hosting- Company Blog

This is a little belated, but I'll post it anyway. I finally upgraded the blog from b2's 0.92 to the shiny new 2.4. If anyone is thinking, "Wow, that's a big leap!" Well, yes, yes it was, mostly because I was A: lazy, and B: concerned about the database upgrade. Fortunately I managed to overcome A and the fear of B to get the upgrade done, and it was all fairly smooth. My fears of a few years worth of typing going down the innerweb tubes in a MySQL holocaust turned out to be unfounded.

Moderation, You Say?

Suffice to say, it's quite the improvement. Granted, were talking 2 versions difference here (okay, 1 and some change), so I'd really hope there were some major changes for the better. A little thing called "comment moderation" is my favorite bit. No longer do I have to return to find the garden overrun with weeds. I can kill them now before they get published. Version .92 placed a bit too much trust in the goodness of men. Empirical evidence demonstrates we're all mostly jerks. Read CNN.com some time.

There's a nice new admin section, and improvements to the template functionality, but in terms of my "work", it's pretty much comment moderation that is the greatest blessing. Though I'm certainly the type that resists it, I have to admit that change can be good. If you get too bogged down in your current rut, you run the risk of missing the signs that it's not really good for you. For the most part, .92 was working for me, but the endless, direct to site, comment spam was creating more and more problems, and requiring more and more attention. I remained in my comfortable rut, still unwilling to change and find something better.

In this case, the "something better" was kind of obvious, but making the move still required enough annoyance to pile up that I finally knew it had to be done. Would life have been simpler if I'd done it sooner? Sure, no doubt about it, but the proverbial Monday-morning quarterbacking won't do any good. The old version did serve adequately, and it provided me some good "hands on" blog experience, but there were fundamental problems with it that would just never change. Version .92 is always going to be version .92.

Content Generation

I am looking forward to working on 2.4. This is my first post in it, and, even though I'm still banging them out in Google Docs, the internal editor is much improved. It's nice it doesn't fly back to the top whenever you select the "strong" tag or add a link. Also makes it easy to add YouTube clips and things, though I seriously doubt I'll have much use for that here. I don't plan on producing any viral promo videos any time soon. I have this strange feeling that trying to shoehorn a "buy website hosting" message into a viral video will look a wee bit contrived. Contrived and viral generally don't mix well.

Look and Feel

As you may have noticed, I had to pick up a new template, as my old one was not up to spec for 2.4. I'll miss the old template, and I even made a post that will have people scratching their heads now. I may fiddle around with the CSS a bit to get a more customized look, but for now it works well enough. It's blue, and the other one was green, and both colors are in the company logo, so I can't complain too much.

I will need to tone down the background image at the top, as the white text on white gradient doesn't really mesh all that well. Contrast is important, kids. I'd love a nice drop shadow instead, but the CSS property "text-shadow" gets absolutely no love from the popular browsers. Perhaps some drop shadow hater thought it might be "overused" and blocked it from widespread implementation.

SEO Features

A final nice bit on the newest version of b2 is the built-in SEO friendliness. The .92 version had a simplify URLs option, but it required a certain server config, and if you didn't have, you were out of luck. The new version defaults to a much friendlier URL structure and file naming conventions. The attention to SEO-detail doesn't stop there. A full section of the blog admin is now devoted to control the flow and display of links, and employing NOINDEX tags to prevent the generation of duplicate content via the various date, category, and default views. The new b2 2.4 provides exceptionally detailed control of these factors, and for the SEO "savvy" it is an excellent addition.

Conclusion

Now that upgrading between major releases is simplified, I will (I hope), manage to stay a bit more current on versioning of my blog here. Having successfully accomplished an upgrade without incurring disaster, the next one should inspire less dread. Not being a total fool, I did back everything up in case of said major emergency, but they turned out to be unnecessary. Unnecessary backups are the best kind, after all.