Things You Should Consider Before Touching Your Blog’s Theme
Posted by Mert Erkal on Oct 17, 2008 in Blogging | 8 comments
This afternoon my face was looking very similar to the man above. I tried to conduct a survey related to social media, but noticed that my blog’s widget settings are not functioning properly. As an established pro-blogger I was so confident that I decided to manually insert the poll plugin code to sidebar.php. The result was 5 hours outage for my blog. Thanks to my blogger friend Alex Sysoef, he recovered my blog. I wanted to share my painful experience with both start-up and established bloggers:
- Do not forget to take a copy of the original codes before you make any changes. Otherwise it will be very painful for you to recover your blog.
- Don’t be so confident about things you are not really good at. Find some experienced friends, or pay someone to do it for you. Believe me it will be much cheaper than spending 5 stressful hours.
- When you have a custom blog design, check whether its widgets are working properly or not.
I feel your pain Mert. I’ve been there a few times. Even forgetting something as simple as a div end tag can be a nightmare. If you don’t catch it right away you have to hunt around forever trying to find the error. I guess I would add that to the list – check your blog after each adjustment by refreshing the site before moving on to the next tweak.
@ Brian : Thanks. Yeah I should have added this too. One of the most important things.
I can understand your frustration, Mert. Normally I make a copy of the original file to wordpad before adding things, but I think most of us at some point have had to re-install themes all over and start from scratch!
@ Mark You are absolutely right
Maybe to have a copy or backup of your blog (or at least the theme) in your localhost, and edit things on it before the web could be a nice idea. Even though it seems a bit more trying, it would be a clean job.
That is the very reason why I do not feel confident yet to move to self hosted blog:) Happy to hear you got it back!
Common Mert!
Don’t tell me it wasn’t fun
When Vasilis contacted me and asked if I could help he used interesting description of your hair been pulled from somewhere 
And to be serious – Backup is a MUST. No matter how confident you are!
@ Alex: Yeah it was fun
You are right, backup is a must 