You might notice that Tiny Subversions is loading faster now. A hell of a lot faster. I migrated from the legacy server that tinysubversions.com has been hosted on since 2005 (back when the domain hosted my personal website and the blog was at Blogger, yuck). The site is now on a server featuring things like a version of PHP that is not 3 years old. Anyway, the new hardware, plus a better default Apache configuration, means that load times for this website are down to a perfectly acceptable ~800ms from an abysmal 4 seconds! That’s a 5X speed improvement. Hope you enjoy it. I know I will.

I finally went ahead and upgraded this site from Thesis 1.6 to Thesis 1.7. It’s mostly introduced a bunch of convenient back-end stuff for me, although I did use the CSS @font-face rule for the first time ever. You can see the results in my new League Gothic header!

Back in November I migrated my blog from Blogspot to WordPress. I am incredibly happy with that decision, in large part because I decided to shell out $87 for the Thesis theme, which you see running here on my blog.

Prior to Thesis I’d used WordPress and definitely liked it. I even found some themes that looked pretty good. But Thesis is more than a theme: it provides an easy dashboard to manage both the design of my blog and the way its content is structured.

One Basic Thing: Nav Menus

For example: that nav bar at the top? Thesis shows me a list of Pages I’ve created in WordPress, and all I have to do is select them and they appear at the top.

What about the nested menus? I just use WordPress’ built-in concept where I set a Page as a child of another Page. That’s it.

That doesn’t even cover the fact that it will also automatically create nav menus for categories. If you look at “Games I Love,” that’s actually a category page, with the names of the games underneath as sub-categories (similar to the concept of child Pages in WordPress).

With the touch a button, I can change the width of my layout or any of my columns, switch seamlessly between 2- and 3-column layout, change my header formatting, change my <meta> info, alter how thumbnails are handled, insert header/footer scripts (like for stats), and <noindex> various pages on my site that I don’t think should show up in Google searches (monthly archives, etc).

And those examples are only the content organization options! The design options abound; I can change the color of all sorts of things on my page, change fonts, create a new default header style, tweak the format of teasers down to the “link to full article” text, change the order of my columns, or switch to a full-width layout for a splash page.

And that doesn’t even begin to cover all the awesome customization I can do with Thesis hooks. Hooks let you insert PHP at specific places in your blog layout (for you Thesis users out there, here’s a handy guide to hooks and an excellent hook plugin called Thesis OpenHook). The social icons on the top of my page and the profile box on the right hand side are two small examples of what I’ve done.

And finally, you get custom CSS control over your page if you need it. Thesis’ default CSS architecture is really clean so it’s easy to make changes to. I often get confused messing around with CSS but a Thesis page is organized in such a way that it’s usually a pretty simple proposition to tweak my CSS to make it do what I want.

Why am I posting this here?

I participate in the Thesis affiliate program: I don’t make a whole lot of money off of it, but it’s a way for me to pay for my web hosting and maybe make up for some of the time I put into this website. And Thesis 1.7 was just released. I’m not using it on Tiny Subversions yet, but I have been playing with it on a test site and it is excellent. There’s an even better dashboard, faster page loading, integration with Javascript libraries like jQuery, better SEO, comment configuration, and more.

So I ask you this: if you’re thinking about buying Thesis, take my word that it is well worth the $87. I wouldn’t be participating in an affiliate program if I didn’t sincerely believe in the product in question. There’s even a 30-day money back guarantee. And if you do buy Thesis, please do so by clicking on one of the affiliate links from my website, or perhaps the little graphic in my right-hand sidebar. If you buy it that way, I get 30% of the money you spend. So while you don’t get a discount, at least you know that you’re also basically donating about $25 to support Tiny Subversions.

If you have any questions about Thesis or this whole affiliate program thing, please feel free to comment here. Thanks!

If you’re seeing this, I have migrated this blog both to WordPress as a platform and to my own domain. I never really knew what to do with tinysubversions.com, and the blogspot page was always my real home on the internet. I’m happy to say that everything has moved over nicely. I might take a hit in PageRank for a little while, but the important thing is that the old permalinks work. Here, try it:

http://tinysubversions.blogspot.com/2007/12/effective-networking-art-of-finding.html

Ta-da!

To do the migration, I ended up using:

• WordPress’ native Blogger import function
• this Blogger to WordPress plugin, which handled the permalink redirection
• Feedburner‘s awesome feed redirection

Granted, it took me forever to find the right combination of tools, but once I did it was easy. Hopefully this will make it easy for anyone who finds this on Google.

For those of you wondering about the theme, I shelled out the cash for Thesis, which is a pretty amazing premium WordPress theme. It lets you do a whole lot of painless tweaking and has some amazing features. Do check out their demo video if you’re interested. Many thanks to Darren Torpey for the recommendation. Hopefully I can return the favor by helping him migrate his Blogger site to WordPress!

Also, I’d like to thank everyone who contributed information when I wrote about my troubles migrating last month.

I’ll be tweaking the theme over the coming days, but for now you might want to take note of the handy “Effective Networking” tab at the top, which leads to my networking articles.

I am thinking of completely nuking the layout of this blog and starting fresh, possibly using pre-generated themes that are already available. I’ve never been all that happy with the way this blog looks, and there are actual professional graphic designers who have made themes for Blogger that I can use. Plus the new Blogger themes are easy to tweak and you can add neat gadget thingies.

I’m attempting to redirect this blog’s feed using Blogger’s auto-redirect feature, mostly because I like to have more complete metrics on who’s reading my blog. If you’re reading this site on a feed and for some reason aren’t getting an updated feed, please let me know.

GDC is nigh!! Tomorrow I fly to San Francisco with Darren. It’s the best week of the year.

I probably won’t be posting here until at least 3/11 when I get back.

I apologize for my dearth of posts this month. I will continue to post very little until after GDC.

This is due mostly to GDC prep, and to a Super Secret Project that I’ll talk about at the beginning of March.

Due to the recent discovery of my very first ever Internet griefer, I’ve enabled comment moderation. What this means to you is that when you post a comment, it goes to me first, and then I decide whether or not it goes on the blog.

So I just upgraded to Blogger Beta. Hopefully nothing will break.

I’m just glad I can tag posts now!