Art of Blogging

As you start hacking your blog into shape, sooner or later, you will break it. This can range from a simple “oops” to something catastrophic. Obviously, the second end of the spectrum is very bad.

Setting up a new theme can sometimes take hours if a lot of changes are needed or you are learning something new. Having your blog not work while you learn how to hack it up is never a good thing. Strangely enough, learning how to modify a blog theme is much more stressful when you know that your blog is broken.

To prevent yourself from destroying a lot of hard work and costing yourself countless hours or from having oddities while you change your blog, I strongly advocate making a separate installation of whatever blog script you are using.

With WordPress, you will follow these installation instructions. You will just make sure to have a new database added so that you do not DELETE YOUR EXISTING BLOG and you will install the second WordPress in a sub directory like: testblog/. Set the config file to use the new DB and the correct directory and you are all set. Any new theme you want to use, you put in on the test blog first and make sure it does what you want. Same is true with any hacks or modifications you make.

With WordPress MU, this is as simple as adding a blog named “testblog” or the like.

This is really a pretty simple and basic thing and takes no real work to accomplish. Having a testbed is the wise thing to do. You may not see the value now, but trust me, you will.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 27th, 2006 at 5:50 am and is filed under Blog Tips, Howto Blog, WordPress MU, WordPress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.