Blog upgrade/Blog update/Blog questions

Finally, I got around to upgrading the software running this blog, WordPress. It’s a much better version in many ways and it’s allowed me to fix some things and preempt certain problems.

I’m happy to say that comments are functioning again. They have not been working for weeks if not months.. and the amount of spam I was getting nearly made my provider shut down my account! In an attempt to deal with those headaches I have installed a plugin that automatically shuts off comments after seven days.

Unfortunately, the default WordPress template has some annoying aspects. For example, the default layout comes with a lot of wasted space on top of the page. Unfortunately, I have not been able to figure out how to get rid of it. Moreover, the link to homepage feature on the header does not seem to be working either. If anyone has any ideas on these, please let me know. I would also like to set up the blog so the sidebar appears on all individual post/archive pages, but that’s not straight forward either.

So while the new WordPress offers much more functionality at some level, unfortunately it’s gotten much more complex and in some ways much more difficult to navigate. Bummer.

2 Responses to “Blog upgrade/Blog update/Blog questions”

  1. eszter Says:

    I’ll update this post in a comment so I can see whether the comments are, in fact, working. I figured out how to add the sidebar to each individual entry page. You have to edit the single.php file. You just set the content to “narrowcolumn” class and add a get_sidebar line to the end of the file. You can just copy the exact code from the index.php file. You find the relevant single.php file in the wp-content/themes/default directory. That is, you pick the directory that contains the theme you are using.

  2. eszter Says:

    Slowly, but surely maybe I’ll figure out all of this. In case anyone else is interested, I was able to narrow the space left for an image on top by editing the header.php file. Right after the commented out text “Because the template is slightly different” change the height specified on the #header line.