// April 30th, 2011 // 1 Comment » // Blog Stuff
As I mentioned in my previous post, the latest WordPress core update did not play nice with the theme on Aquilaonline. Suffice to say, I’ve had to do a minor theme refresh to get the various elements, plug-ins, widgets and other bits of code to work again.
In the process, I’ve had to kill some of my favourite (read: labour of love tinkering) widgets.
One of these used to show album art of the recently scrobbled songs on Last.fm. Took me ages to “perfect” the look and feel of the album covers, together with the placement on the site and corresponding links back to the track and artist info on Last.fm When I think about it, I wonder if anybody was really interested in what I was listening to? I guess the same could be said for people posting their top 5 artists/songs of the week on twitter/facebook or wherever.
Other than showing off to family members or providing some minor spectator value for the casual blog browser, I’m not sure the mere automated posting of recently played tracks actually influenced anyone enough to click and listen/buy/recommend the track/album/artist to others. Does a recommendation about a particular song or artist carry more weight in influencing others to take action?
I think the answer is yes. Personal recommendations and word-of-mouth referrals do carry a lot more weight. Perhaps instead of just automatically posting my recently played tracks, the focus should rather shift to genuine recommendations, research, interesting info that may be relevant to the audience.
Hmm… What do you think? Interested or not?
Hopefully most bits and bobs are up and running. I will however still be tinkering a bit with the theme until everything is satisfactory again.
** Update 10 hours later **
I finally managed to track down the problem.
If you’re using the Irresistible theme from WooThemes, the biggest issue when upgrading your WordPress core is that the idTabs jQuery script also needs to be updated. The old js file basically broke a tonne of my widgets, but after much tinkering (and referencing my regular backups) I got it all to work again.
Along with the fix to my tabs, I also managed to restore and restyle the fmTuner plugin . Now I can bore you a bit longer with my bad taste in music.
For some reason I always approach a database core upgrade with some trepidation. Perhaps it is because in the past, I’ve had to spend hours fixing the entire site – see A minor refresh as an example of what happened in April this year.
