This is always bad, but strangely not-so-bad, when it happens:
It’s bad bad bad because no-one can view the site … but of course it only happens because the site is popular! Luckily, GBMINI will never suffer this fate 😉
(thanks, RB, for making sure I noticed!)
Hopefully DB, Gabe, etc will soon have MotoringFile up and running again; I wonder if it was triggered by all the MINI E coverage …
As you may know, this website is powered by WordPress; I used to use MovableType but WordPress is much more flexible, and less complicated. I know many other MINI bloggers also use WordPress – so it must be a good choice 🙂
A while back, WordPress released v2.5 (then v2.6), basically insisting that people upgrade – so I did move over to it … and HATED IT! The new layouts, etc, were simply not very user-friendly; here for example is a screenshot of the front admin page (“dashboard”):
You can see that there’s a big area at the top (“Right Now”) given to stats (how many posts / comments / etc), and below that some details on recent comments and incoming links; the most important thing – “Write A New Post” – is tucked on the end of a title bar, right next to “Write A New Page” which I hardly ever use – it’s easy to hit the wrong one if you’re not paying attention! There’s also a lot of blank space on the screen …
These sort of changes carry throughout the admin pages, and I found this new layout significantly worse to use than the v2.3 layout – so much so, that I kept my websites running on the earlier version:
The v2.3 version is just a little simpler to work with – for example the first thing you see on the “dashboard” is “Write A Post”, which is what you want, and there’s an “Edit” link next to each comment (on v2.6 there’s no way to edit a comment from the “dashboard” and even in the comments page, you have to realize that to edit a comment, you should click the author’s name!)
Apparently, many other WordPress users were similarly unimpressed, and a usability study was commissioned (which makes fascinating reading!)
The result, was a massive redesign, which is now available as a Beta test – so I tried it on a new (free hosting!) account (don’t put a Beta on your main site, in case it breaks!)
I am blown away by how good the v2.7 redesign is / will be!
The v2.7 “dashboard” is fully customisable, so you can omit the stuff you don’t care about – and all the useful stuff has been improved to make it work properly (for example, you can now see comment text right there, and edit or delete it immediately); there’s even a new “QuickPress” feature to get something short and sweet published right away with no page navigation needed …
I’m looking forwarded to updating all my sites to this new WordPress version, just as soon as it gets officially released 🙂
I was checking my (many!) registered domain names earlier today (including grabbing another one for $6/year to prevent it being poached), and I noticed that 1and1 still maintains the customer data I had when gbmini was hosted by them!
Of course, most of the links will go to (this) current website, but if you manually go to the old weblog you see the last post about the first MCSa at MINI of Peabody – this was back when I was driving Indi Blue GBMINI#2, before GBMINI#3 was ordered and of course way before my current MINIs were built!
It’s funny to see this data still sitting in 1and1’s servers, when I now only use them for domain registration … I wonder if I could use the storage there?!
M&I / GBMINI 