Done. At last. A few unforeseen complications, but nothing too serious.

A few notes to myself for things to do in the future:

• Look at why the Plesk manager on my virtual server is insisting on adding a call to open_basedir every time I make any changes to the setup. Failing that, find out why 2 of my plugins bring the site to its knees when its set
• Integrate the plugins I use the most into the actual theme. Hopefully that’ll mean next time I hack the code I won’t have to remember to change the settings through the WordPress UI
• Take a closer look at how the CSS is rendering in IE6. Noticed a few bugs just now but too tired to fix them
• Get the incoming feeds (flickr, del.icio.us) caching. Altogether, on the front page at least, they look to be adding 3-4 seconds onto the load time
• Get the site validating to xHTML again. A mix of my navigation, some plugins, and a few quickly typed posts are causing it to fail
• Stop linking to YouTube videos. Lately their embedded flash viewer is taking ages to load
• Get more sleep

And on that note, I think I’ll call tonight a relative success and get some deserved rest. Night! 😀

– update –
Another one for the list…

• Test HARD on every version of IE. Don’t take for granted that anything is going to display the way I think it will until I see it with my own eyes!

– update 2 –
Decided to change the title because its not over yet. Couple of design bugs I don’t have time to fix right now and a few compatibility issues with WordPress 2.3 that need looking at, then I’ll be done 😉

– update 3 –
Good news – title now changed back! Yay!

Bad news – feeds broken. Tested the template but it doesnt seem to be anything to do with that – assume its some sort of compatibility issue with WordPress 2.3.1 and a plugin. (fixed! Turns out it was due to the flickrpages plugin I put together for my photos page!)
Also the bookmarks “Tag Filter” links are broken. Seems that WordPress 2.3 tries to deal with canonical URLs itself by redirecting to what it thinks the permalinks should be. Unfortunately for me, that means “/bookmarks?tag=xxx” becomes “/bookmarks/?tag=xxx”, so WordPress assumes the “?tag” bit is a seperate page and throws a 404. There must be a way of getting round this using the native canonical URL system, but I may need to switch it off and revert back to using the Permalink Redirect plugin (now fixed by moving the entire page out of the CMS and onto its own static page).

Either way, I’ll get these fixed tomorrow!