eHarmony Blog.com

Oh boy, I got three search engine results visitors already. Those crawlers are fast.

Checklist of site upgrades to eHarmony Blog:

• Upgrade to WordPress 2.3 – DONE (see note below)
• Use the most bare WordPress plugins – DONE
• Use a faster, thinner, less-dynamic WordPress theme – DONE (see note below)
• Upgrade internal search engine – DONE
• Use WP Super Cache
• Review each blog post since the beginning
• Remove bewhiskered entries
• Promote the eHarmony Blog script and the My Matches greasemonkey script
• Create stubs for all canned questions
• Invite more points of view
• More means of interaction

Dexter, aka spiffy WP 2.3

eHarmony Blog (re)starts off using WordPress 2.3, a hot-spanking version with several new features useful to eHB’s administrator (me), editors, contributors and readers:

• A new “pending review” feature. This allows any newly-registered user to immediately submit posts for review by an editor or administrator. In other words, eHB is post-and-go for everyone.
• A spanking improved visual editor. More stable, more features than before.
• Native tagging support. Do you love to write? Do you love tags? Then tag away and your post is automatically indexed on Technorati on those tags. I’ll be tagging all my previous posts myself as I give them a once-through. When I’ve amassed tags, I’ll install the tag cloud widget, so you readers can go tag-hopping.
• Widget support. This is more for me. What always bothered me in the past year maintaining the blog is the installation of widgets and features. Tweaking and debugging PHP is frequently no fun. Widgets separate the functionality from the theme files. With hope, I can expect to be able to switch themes or upgrade them when a better one comes along.

New theme

After three days of searching, I’ve decided on a WordPress theme called “blog.txt” created by Scott Allan Wallick and used in his site plaintxt.org. I’ll probably make small changes on the typeface colours later.

The airy, easier-to-read theme reads great on mobile devices and narrow screens and is XHTML 1.0 strict-compliant (that is, until I mess it up when I add new widgets or plugins). Speaking of widgets, blog.txt is all ready for any of the over 130 Automattic widgets (now called WordPress Widgets) available in http://widgets.wordpress.com/ .

But I really really don’t want to add any more fanciness. Post pages are now 9K or less and the main page is 15K or less, including graphics and stylesheets. We love a faster eHarmony Blog.

What do you think of the new look?

Open for contributors

As before, eHB is looking for contributors and correspondents. Register today and start writing!