Churning Madness

With some trepidation, I have cleaned up the vitals of my old site (fairly minimal) and have made the switch to having this be my user’s root homepage. w00t.

Still trying to iron things out on the server end. Also got allot of content I dumped into “Pages” that needs to be thrashed into better content. Also got allot of things to post about that I never got to with the old site. All in good time.

My only big annoyance right now is that “Pages” cannot be categorized. What if I want a Page that relates to a category of other things I’ve posted about?? I could just post about the subject, but then it will get lost over time. How to I assign permanence to a post!?

So, I was setting up a daily dump of the Wordpress database, when I discovered that there was about 500KB of data. What!? Seriously, that couldn’t be right. But it was.

Narrowed it down to a cached copy of three RSS feeds, stored in the administrative “options” table. Why would cached data of any RSS feeds, let alone those that are superfluous to Wordpress development belong there????

Anyway, commented out the PHP lines that fetch the RSS feeds. Then manually had to remove the cached entries in the database itself. Now it compresses down under 5KB. I’m content for now.

As to why this data was stored there, or at all is still a mystery to me. But I’m a newbie; I’m not supposed to understand, right?

So, I finally broke down and tackled all the tasks of setting up Wordpress on my home server. 2 nights later, I felt like I knew how the whole system works… enough at least to leave it up and running. Future experience will dictate whether I like it or not.

Right now, it is not linked from the root of my webpage, so realistically I’m the only one who will view this. But given enough time, I’ll make the switch. I wish to figure out the basics of configuration; I also wish to import most of the static info from my current (old and busted) webpage. After that, it should be a go.