How Our Latest Changes Affect You
Blog / Produced by The High Calling
For those of you who host your blog on HighCallingBlogs.com, the changes we made to the data base over the weekend mean that you will have to access your blog from different web address. It also means you stand a good chance of needing to change which theme you are using on your blog. Let me explain.
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I know these include a couple of our more popular themes. The themes we had available were grabbed (somewhat arbitrarily, I'm afraid) more than two and a half years ago. We've made several changes and upgrades to our installation since then and these themes just can't keep up anymore.
We've got some hacks in place to keep the themes working for a little while longer to give you time to select a new theme. But we will be removing those hacks shortly and then these five themes will break. Pretty much completely.
On the good news side we've added more than 2 dozen new themes for you to choose from. Several of these have lots of customization options so you can really personalize your blog moving forward if you like. Don't forget to click on the second page to see the rest of the available themes. (The link to the second page is on the right side of the page at about the same height as the "Themes" menu item parallel to the red arrow in the screen shot above.)
To know whether your blog is using one of the five themes that are being discontinued, check the "Themes" menu. If the theme showing up top is not also showing in the list of available themes (remember to check the second page of available themes) then we ask you to please select a new theme.
Finally, I'd like to personally thank all of you once again for your continued patience with our ongoing improvements to the site. Marcus and the team have a really big vision for where we're taking the HighCallingBlogs.com community. I am confident that you will like where we're going in the end.
This latest step was critical to giving us the ability to add features which will greatly enhance community interaction and better include all our community bloggers (i.e. all you good folks) regardless of where your blogs reside.
--Chris
First the Good News
The good news is the modifications to the data base went fairly smoothly. Sure there were a few unexpected bumps. But we kind of expected something might crop up since we were making some changes that conventional wisdom says "can't be done." Even though we were working on the site throughout most of the weekend we only took it offline for a total of about 5 hours. And that was on Saturday morning. Although if you were on your own HighCallingBlogs.om blog throughout the weekend you might have noticed some weirdness from time to time. It looks like we have things sorted out now. At least as far as we can tell.Login or Get Help
To log in to your blog you will need to go to a different URL than before. The new location of your dashboard is here: Where blogname is changed out for the name of your blog. If you are unsure what your blogname is, just click on your old bookmark. You will get an error page, but look at the URL in the address bar. The old URL showing should look something like this: Move that blogname in front of "highcallingblogs.com". Separate the two with a period (not a slash) and make sure you only have one slash after "highcallingblogs.com". If that totally confused you and you can't access your blog please give me a holler and I'll get you sorted out. Oh, and one other note before I give my contact info. I said we have things sorted out with the site, "as far as we can tell." But you may find some things we missed. I expect these will mostly be things like broken links and missing images. If you run across any of these, please give me a shout and I'll get them sorted out for you. The fastest way to get my attention is to send me a DM on Twitter where I am @ChrisCree. That's the way I recommend asking for help because I will see it right away and respond. But if you really don't want to use Twitter (try it, you'll like it!) you can also send me an email to chris [at] highcallingblogs [dot] com.Now the Bad News
Unfortunately I do have some bad news for several of you. Several of our existing themes are not compatible with the current changes we've made. If you are using any of the following themes you will need to change your blog theme as soon as possible:- Blue Curves
- Navigation
- Positive Feeling
- Torn Paper
- Travelogue
[/caption]
I know these include a couple of our more popular themes. The themes we had available were grabbed (somewhat arbitrarily, I'm afraid) more than two and a half years ago. We've made several changes and upgrades to our installation since then and these themes just can't keep up anymore.
We've got some hacks in place to keep the themes working for a little while longer to give you time to select a new theme. But we will be removing those hacks shortly and then these five themes will break. Pretty much completely.
On the good news side we've added more than 2 dozen new themes for you to choose from. Several of these have lots of customization options so you can really personalize your blog moving forward if you like. Don't forget to click on the second page to see the rest of the available themes. (The link to the second page is on the right side of the page at about the same height as the "Themes" menu item parallel to the red arrow in the screen shot above.)
To know whether your blog is using one of the five themes that are being discontinued, check the "Themes" menu. If the theme showing up top is not also showing in the list of available themes (remember to check the second page of available themes) then we ask you to please select a new theme.
Finally, I'd like to personally thank all of you once again for your continued patience with our ongoing improvements to the site. Marcus and the team have a really big vision for where we're taking the HighCallingBlogs.com community. I am confident that you will like where we're going in the end.
This latest step was critical to giving us the ability to add features which will greatly enhance community interaction and better include all our community bloggers (i.e. all you good folks) regardless of where your blogs reside.
--Chris
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