Migrating toward Mobile Friendly

I’m slower than molasses in a northern winter but am gradually migrating toward a mobile friendly layout for the the generators. In keeping with my minimal design, it should be a reasonably straight forward process. With any significant change, I expect a few hiccups and layout abnormalities.

While the blog has long had a mobile friendly theme, the generators were stuck in the last decade with a fixed-width, static layout that was tinier than a snail anus for small devices. I’m likely going to drop the side bar menu entirely and use the maximum space for results. Still, I’m waffling on some choices so pages and layouts will be in flux for the next few weeks.

Yell at me if you find anything broken. I’ll deserve it.

Well, we’ve moved

I transitioned the site from a shared hosting server over to a VPS. Due to my failure, a few posts fell through the cracks. I’m working to get a newer backup from the former hosts but it’s not on my priority list.

I still have another wordpress installation to process and I fricking hate them. Plus a few other things I have yet to setup.

Stuff is live, flowing, and doing what websites do. It is fun to see live logs again. I have to fix several bits of code to quash warnings. I’m not going to miss OldPappy. Many thanks to the guys at FirstLink for helping with the setup and actually being humans behind a phone number or email. I owe you beers and perhaps smoked pork.

It’s damn nice to be able to update files without weird oddities and “support” people telling you to use insecure variants.

Some stuff may still be broken. I’ll fix anything I can on a daily basis until I’m confident we’ve made it through the transition.

Maintenance: Utility Tweaks

Each of the utilities was tweaked slightly today. Everything should be functional again. I tested all of them after the tweaking. However, I may have missed a variant. If something appears broken, I’d appreciate a heads up.

The Phantom ‘Mithril Mage’

Over the last few months, I have been getting increasing numbers of people visiting based off ‘mithril mage’ as a search term. The first time I saw it mentioned was kesher’s post on the odd74 forums. Since it is becoming increasingly popular, I decided to go with the flow.

The hostname, mithrilmage.com has been registered and will point to the mithrilandmages.com domain. Quick and simple. It is a bit shorter for those who still type in urls. People like me. The shorter domain should be available within 48 hours as the update progresses to the various domain servers.

The label inspired me. So I used it to inspire someone else. The results should launch sometime in 2012.

Breakage Complete

The main task was to hack up the original theme to allow single column pages. WordPress 3.3 has issues with new page templates. Working around that took a while.

I also moved all the CSS and primary theme files into source control so I can tweak, revert, tweak again, and repeat. You know, so when I bork it completely, reversion is easy.

Things May Break

Tweaking on theme for an enhancement. By its nature its intrusive and probably should be done on a development site. I’m lazy and not going to set one up.

Things I’ve broken:

Menus

Apparently if you want to add new templates under WordPress v3.3, you have to deactivate and reactive the desired them. The unintended consequences is that the menus were lost. Along with other settings. Bleah.

Fix: Re-select the default menu under Appearance/Menus. That was easy.

A smattering of cleanup

The error causing the blog section of the site to load improperly has been correct. The cause was conflicting style sheet information in the form of widgets. Those widgets have been removed in favor of original uncomplicated theme.

The Labyrinth Lord Resource List has been divided into four different pages. Separating the elements was necessary due to the massive growth of information over the last few weeks. In addition to the growth, the information requires a better structure for maintenance. The maintenance infrastructure is not complete but should roll out soon.