Thanks for all your kind words on Twitter regarding my blog going down for a while (and me losing most of the database). I’m happy to say that the blog is doing a lot better after applying some elbow grease over the past few days. Here’s what I’ve been working on…

• Get a few blog post drafts rewritten that were lost in the hard drive crash. I’ve had some excellent ideas for blog posts that have been sitting in my drafts folder for a while that I’ve been working on over time, and while you guys have never seen them, losing them was a huge loss to me. I spent a good part of yesterday rewriting what I remembered while I still remembered it.
• I reinstalled plugins that were active on my blog before the cash. Well, most of them (see below).
• Got this new theme up! This theme, Magazeen, was featured on Smashing Magazine a few months ago, and it caught my eye. Now that I had an excuse to using a premade theme (I really really don’t want to make my own from the ground up again), I applied this one without thinking twice. It turns out that I didn’t save myself much time by using a premade theme. Many aspects of it are not working exactly right, or are outright broken. For example…
  • The date that a comment was made always showed up as the date the post they were commenting on was posted, regardless of when the comment was left. Atlhough a small fix, it was a pain to track down (thanks for pointing it out, readers!).
  • The cool hover effect you see up top there that shows you the blog title when you hover over the image is unbelievably picky. For some reason enabling CommentLuv or WoW Armory (WordPress plugins) causes it to completely stop working. I’ve contacted the author of the latter (CommentLuv has no contact form outside of their forums, which go undread), and hope to figure out what’s causing it and get it fixed soon. Until then, there are a few plugins that remain disabled until that’s worked out.
  • Most of the pink on this page was changed to be blue. Don’t get me wrong, I’m quite secure in my sexuality, but as some readers pointed out, having the color pink splashed all over the blog was just a bit to much for a blog run by a guy.
  • I’ve started using the more tag to show only the first snippet of long posts on the front page. The RSS feed still shows the full post (or should…), so worry not RSS subscribers of mine! This should make the front page a lot easier to skim through. Also, after a lot of hacking around, I got it to only show the “Continue Reading” link if the post has a more tag! Yay!
  • This theme needs an image for each post to display properly. I went through most of my posts and created an image in the proper dimensions for it for the blog to look proper. While I haven’t added an image to all my posts (yet), all the posts on the front page have an image now, so the blog should look and work properly.
• One of the plugins I’ve decided to get rid of (it didn’t play nicely with Wowhead) was one that created item popups for code such as [item]Item Name[/item]. Of course, I now have a whole pile of posts that were using those codes that now look like complete gibberish. Worst of all were posts that were made up of those links almost exclusively (such as my tailoring 375-450 guide). I’ve fixed a few of them up, but it’s an ongoing effort. Should be done over the next few days though.
• I also modified how item links look on the page. While it’s personal preference, I think item links look really really cool now. (Check this out: Bolt of Imbued Frostweave)

The blog is nowhere near as complete as I’d like it to be, but I’m very excited to see it getting closer and closer. There’s something about a new theme and that new shine that re-ignites the spark in me that makes me want to blog several times a day.