Cant Keep Quiet!

Yesterday I got home from work to find that my blog was looking strange. No, not strange because it had a different theme. Strange because the Shhh! theme no longer had columns and everything was centered on the screen.

At the time I didn’t have time to do anything about the problem. Rather than leave it looking messed up, I switched to a different theme that I had downloaded a while back.

I had never planned on leaving that theme up but I didn’t have the time to try and investigate the problem until now. Just as strangely, now I don’t need to fix the theme.

I selected the Shhhh! theme again and clicked on view site just to see what it was doing. Instead of everything being centered and the columns being gone it looked perfect.

Weird. I won’t complain, however. It just means that I don’t have to wrack my puny coding skills to fix my blog. That’s a good thing because I’m beat. My puny coding skills are even punier due to exhaustion.

For quite some time I’ve been using Hosting Matters as the service provider for this blog. Until recently I’ve been very satisfied with their service.

Lately, though, that satisfied feeling has started to fade.

Yesterday when I got home my blog seemed to have vanished from the face of the internet. The cpanel and the home site for my blog host were also gone. It finally came back up about 10 to 15 minutes later. Who knows how long it was out altogether.

I would like to know if you are satisfied with your blog host. I’m not interested in a free service like blogspot or WordPress.com. The url I use belongs to me and a free service would force me to take on another url.

For an unknown period of time my blog was showing the WordPress default theme instead of the Shhh! theme. I say unknown because it was on the Shhh! theme when I last saw it before heading to bed last night and then was on the default theme when I went to delete a spam comment at just after 11:00.

The Shhh! theme was still there so it was easy to switch it back. But I don’t know how it got switched in the first place.

Any ideas?

1. Well, I’m done updating plugins for tonight. No, I didn’t get through all of them but I got through at least half.

I’ve decided that I have way too many plugins and there are several that I’m not really using. As I’ve gone along I’ve been deleting plugins that I wasn’t using. Usually it’s no big deal but every now and then it causes issues.

Sometimes I miss problems because I’m logged into the blog. I do check in another web browser, though. Just in case I missed something, please let me know if something isn’t working correctly.

2. You’ll notice that you can now edit your comments for up to 5 minutes after you first submit them. That will allow you to fix any typos or add something if you want. I first saw a similar feature on A Feast of Crumbs and was toying with the idea of having the same feature. I doubt I have the same plugin that he’s been using.

The plugin is called WP Ajax Edit Comments if you have a WordPress blog and are interested in having this feature.

I think 5 minutes would be plenty but I’m could be swayed to raise it to 10 minutes if people think that would be best.

3. I spent a lot of time tonight trying to find a plugin that would add a format bar to the comments area. Nothing to fancy, just a simple bar that would have a button for bold, italic, and links would be enough. I couldn’t find anything. Does anyone know if there is a WordPress plugin out there that would add such a bar to the comments area?

I’m trying to update the blog tonight so if anything acts wonky, please leave a comment here.

Actually, what I’m updating are the plugins. The plugin update manager is not as useful as I would like. It only lets you know about updates to plugins listed at a certain area. Since most of mine aren’t, it’s practically useless.