We’re off this week from both The BradCast and Green News Report, for a much-needed breather.
Of course, we never really take breathers around here. Especially these days. And, especially nearing what I’ll call “the end” of my year-long background project transitioning 22-years of BRAD BLOG stories, reports, programs and more from our really old WordPress software (v2.0.2, for those of you who track such things), up to the very latest, much faster, and much more secure version of WordPress.
It was no easy trick updating the database and the customization that we’d built in from the beginning, from v2.0.2 to what we are now, finally running here. That, of course, was the biggest problem. A brilliant coder, longtime colleague and friend of mine had done the original customization to the core WP files for the site, and then passed away suddenly a few years later. I was left clueless as to the location and the code used to make the actual changes. The result was that any regular ol’ upgrade of the software to a newer version essentially broke the entire blog.
It took about 20 years until I found a few heroic folks willing and able enough to figure out how to overcome all of that. It then took me another year to figure out how to replace that customization (that was still needed!) with modern tools that now exist, allowing us to avoid hacking into the main core files that had prevented me from being able to update entirely for so long, since any update to the software system would overwrite all the customization! I also needed to learn how to design for the modern WordPress engine, which allows for design that adapts on the fly to mobile and tablet views along with the standard desktop design. It’s all very different than the original HTML world that I had become fairly adept at. The new stuff was (and is) way above my pay-grade. But I’ve learned just enough to be dangerous.
This is all some pretty geeky, low-level stuff. Though I suspect there may be a few nerds like me who may be interested (and/or wondering why the hell it took so long for The BRAD BLOG to join the modern world in the first place!)
In any event, we finally made it over the transition a few weeks ago, as I suspect you’ve noticed, and I have been stunned at the lack of problems or complaints! Perhaps folks are just being polite. Though politeness never stopped readers from screaming in my direction when something simply didn’t work.
But, I think we’re successfully over the hump (which is unspeakably cool to me, on a personal level), and now I’m working through a number of things….
- Cleanup of some existing code from stories and pages created for the old site that look terrible in the new format. A lot of the old stuff doesn’t look great. The stuff that is “acceptable”, I’ll likely leave as is. The stuff that is unreadable, well, I’m still discovering and fixing those things on the fly. Please let me know via email or comments below if you find anything like that yourself! A specific URL is helpful, if you can share it. There are nearly 15,000 blog items and more than 175,000 comments at The BRAD BLOG currently. So, maybe I missed a thing or two.
- Some long-overdue changes to the blog itself, that I’d hoped to do for years, but couldn’t for various reasons. For example, an updated logo seems like a nice idea. We’ve been using the one that I created in about 5 minutes 22 years ago for the old old site (the one with the green background, that I suspect a few readers may still remember!). Please pardon me as I mess around with such things, and feel free to let me know what you love, hate or that simply doesn’t work as we go. I’ll not be offended either way.
- Some improvements on some of the new features. (For example: Search is now 1000 times better than it was on the old site! Check it out! But, I’m still working on a lot of improvements to the way search works and the results that are returned.
- Some bells and whistles that I was never able to do in the old architecture, always wanted to, but that I’m actually able to do now (presuming I can figure out how to do so! I still don’t actually know what I’m doing when it comes to HTML and especially PHP, the language at the core of WordPress and all of the plugins and snippets that can now be used with it. (Again, that’s more geekery. But those who know, know.) Some of those changes will be really helpful. Others are what I’ve come to refer to on my long ToDo list as “cup-holders” (ya know…like the nice-to-have, but not needed as much as actual improvements to fuel efficiency that Detroit wasted years on! And still is!)
Anyway, with a bit of “time off”, I hope to both look away from the news, where and when I can (wish me luck!), and probably tinker with some of the stuff that still exists on my still long transition ToDo list. Much of it will be far more valuable as we get closer to the 2026 midterm elections. In case you were wondering.
While I’m “gone”, I hope ya’ll will continue to tinker with some of the new features and/or cup-holders here. Especially a few of the things I created from the ground up, like the Comments system and the totally cool new Media Player that now makes listening, sharing, downloading (and even embedding elsewhere) all of the audio content we’ve got on the site going back for two decades, whether its BradCast, Green News Report or other random audio stuff going back years and years.
As always, I am tremendously grateful to those who are able to support our work with a donation. They continue to be needed now more than ever!
We’ll likely have Toons next Sunday (if I can convince myself to take the time needed to pull them together while I’m supposed to not be thinking about the news) and maybe some other content between now and then. Or maybe not. Because who doesn’t enjoy another cup-holder or two?
See ya soon…
