Scott B. Williams

Author of Post Apocalyptic Action & Adventure

web design

Updating to WordPress 3.9.2

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I just completed a mandatory update of WordPress to version 3.9.2 as required by my web hosting provider, and so far everything seems to be working fine.  Since there are so many potential things that can go wrong with these updates, the WordPress website has about a gazillion pages of warnings and precautions about backing up files, databases, plug-ins, etc.; enough technical stuff to make you want to throw your hands up and scream.

Since I’m a risk-taker by nature and I’ve rebuilt my website and blogs many times over through the years, I decided that I wasn’t too worried about it if it did crash during the update, so I did the minimum and downloaded an automatic back-up plug-in that would supposedly allow me to restore the site if the worse happened.  Then I just went ahead and pushed the “update” button and held my breath.  A few minutes later, I logged into my dashboard using my other computer, and saw that it had a whole new look and feel, but thankfully, the parts of my site visible to readers did not.  So, as far as I can tell, the update was painless and trouble free.  I haven’t gone through every post and manually checked every link, but the random ones I have checked seemed to still look okay and the links seem to be working.  If you do find anything broken, please shoot me an email to let me know.  This post is also sort of a test to make sure new posts appear as I expect them to.

I’m about to set up some new pages here on the site, and will also be including a opt-in email newsletter to keep readers updated on my next book releases beyond Refuge.  More on that soon.

Migrating Main Site to WordPress

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You’ll no doubt notice that my main website has a completely new look.  That’s because I’m in the process of moving it from the old and and outdated html static site I first started building around 2003.  Just about any type of website can benefit from a blog, and of course, I’ve been blogging on different niche sites for years now, covering everything from the construction of my Tiki 26 catamaran to the concept of bugging-out in a survival situation as put forth in my books, Bug Out and Bug Out Vehicles and Shelters. 

The challenge has been to integrate all these sites in a way that is consistent and easy to find, and to that end, I’ve decided to convert the site hosted at my scottbwilliams.com domain to a WordPress blog and website combination, which as you can see in the navigation bar above has links to all my other blogs as well as some “static” info pages that I will be expanding on in the future.

Rather than publish a separate Blogger blog as I was doing before and hosting it on my home page inside an iframe, which is far from ideal, I can now post directly to this site and you will be able to read the updates on the home page.  I had been reluctant to dive into learning how to work with WordPress after spending so much time in the past setting up and customizing sites on Blogger, but now that I have been working with it for a couple of days it’s easy to see why the platform is so popular.  WordPress can do just about anything you’d ever want to do in web design and it optimizes pages and posts so that the search engines can readily find and index them.  I hope to eventually get around to converting my other blogs to WordPress, but for now I’ll work with this site awhile until I learn more about the platform.

My main intention here is to use this page as a place to post notices of updates to those other sites, as well as news of my books and other projects and any other content that doesn’t really fit into the focused topics of the other sites.  In addition to this page, I’ve also recently set up a Facebook Author Page where it will be easy post short updates and links, and for readers to comment, ask questions or share with others in their social networks.  To stay on top of the latest from there, follow my posts on Facebook by clicking the “Like” button for my page:

I’ve also configured separate social networking buttons to show at the bottom of each post in this site to allow easy sharing of content to Facebook and Twitter. And then I’ve enabled comments for posts, allowing you to reply directly to a particular post or ask a question about it.  All comments will unfortunately have to be approved by me before publishing though, due to spammers out there who love to try and post links back to all sorts of questionable sites by commenting on blog posts they think are open and unmonitored.

I’m looking forward to working with this new site and hopefully interacting more with the readers of my books, blogs and articles.  If you have any suggestions or requests I’d love to hear from you.

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