The IBDPage is up again!

When I started this site years ago it was just a few pages with some thought about IBD. I got a lot of positive comments about the site and it gets a few hundred viewers a year so have kept it alive. I used to maintain it on a computer on my desktop so editing was pretty easy, and it was initialy a tiny site. After I moved to work at Sinai I didn’t have access to a desktop server with a fixed IP, so I moved everything to a hosting service. This is on a shared server at name.com. It really is more professional this way.

Now I have moved to a content management system. When the site was tiny doing the HTML by hand was OK. Now the site has risen to small. And it’s surprising how much work even a small site takes to maintain. I’ve loaded WordPress on my site, made a few customizations to a standard theme, and expect things to be a lot easier going forward. I used to do posts, move other posts to an archive page, update the archive page, and keep track of other links. The CMS I chose to use was WordPress. Mostly because it is the most popular blog software, and the IBDPage is in the main a blog. There are a few pages of links to a few selected sites that I share, and this little page that describes the setup.

For those interested in the technical details, I use the company name.com for my DNS server as well as web hosting. They have a technology named cPanel that lets me configure the site. Setting up WordPress was easy. cPanel has an installer included for WordPress. I installed WordPress into a subdirectory of the IBDPage for development. After transferring the content I moved the files around to the IBDPage directory and the WordPress files are now what you get when you use my site.

The WordPress theme I picked was Twenty Sixteen. I modified it by creating a child theme. I just used a little CSS to change the sizes of some of the headers and links. I edited the style.css file using BBEdit. There was a little problem with the changes not always being displayed. I fixed that by going into the file wp-blog-header.php and changing it to:

<?php
/**
 * Loads the WordPress environment and template.
 * @package WordPress
 */
$debug = true;
if ($debug or ! isset( $wp_did_header ) ) {
	$wp_did_header = true;
	// Load the WordPress library.
	require_once( dirname( __FILE__ ) . '/wp-load.php' );
	// Set up the WordPress query.
	wp();
	// Load the theme template.
	require_once( ABSPATH . WPINC . '/template-loader.php' );
}

When I’m not still tweaking the site format I’ll set debug to false. This site is not high volume, so the server load is not much of an issue. The above code is not the recommended way of doing child themes. However, it is good enough. I’ll probably upgrade in the future. For now I.m just trying to get this site moved into WordPress.

Other customizations were done with the WordPress editor. Overall, not so bad.

Stephen Holland