Beta Beta Beta

So in the past month I’ve upgraded WordPress three times thanks to the 2.3 betas – and yet I’ve only updated the website… what… once? Strike that, I’ve now updated it for a fourth time before I could even get out of this first paragraph. I’m beginning to believe that my writing career may never take off and I should get a real job…

Anywho, THOMnottom.com is now rocking the first release candidate of the next version of WordPress. Of course my main reason for deciding to take the plunge forward is the new built-in tag support. And, of course, my current theme does not show tags by default and I’ve yet to add tags to any posts. Then again, considering this is only my second post with that possibility (well, I had a bunch tagged before thanks to a plugin, but I wiped them all out), that’s not a big deal.

There have been a few other changes of late and I just thought I’d point them out. I now have a real Archives page once again. And much better than ever before, thanks to Justin Blanton’s Smart Archives for WordPress. Now you can easily scroll through the previous 850 posts I’ve written over the past 4+ years. Wait, 850?!?! I’m not sure if that’s totally awesome or totally lame, but that’s a big freakin’ number. I sure hope there’s something worthwhile in those archives.

I also started to close comments on older posts again. Akismet has crushed most of my spam problems (just check out the counter on the main page currently at over 25,000 blocked), but a few continued to slip by. While this didn’t bother me that much, an e-mail from my sister Kathleen made me realize that anyone subscribed to the comments on older posts would end up getting spammed through my site. That’s a big no-no. Thankfully I found James McKay’s Comment Timeout. Not only does it let you decide how long to wait until comments are turned off (currently set at 90 days), but it also lets you hold off on popular posts. So if I ever have 12 people comment on a single post, that one will stay open for an additional 90 days. That’s totally rad.

Hmm… I had a few other things. There’s a link back to my host Site5.com in case anyone is looking for a good deal (and excellent service). I decided to ditch the blinking one in favor of a more subdued look – because I’m clearly a subdued guy. Oh, and I started to write something lame for my About page. I really need to be inspired, because right now it sucks.

So, yeah, that was a lot of boring site stuff, but I needed to get it all out there before I could get back to writing about my boring life. Uh, welcome back to me…