Well, it seems like DreamHost did fix most of their problems and the speed in which my sites are loading are more in line with what I want them to be. I still think there is room for improvement but I’m not convinced its a hosting issue. Rather, I think, it’s a MySQL or PHP configuration problem and the DB queries aren’t running as fast as they should be. If anyone knows how to tweak a MySQL/PHP/WordPress server system (and can speak in a way that novices like me can understand), I would appreciate the help.
The new theme is really growing on me. The theme I choose, blog.txt by Scott Allan Wallick at plaintxt.org, is perfect for my new found sense of minimalism. I ran into some trouble with the theme and widgets and Scott was very helpful and solved my problem within minutes of me showing him what was going wrong. I really can’t thank him enough – for creating the theme in the first place and helping me work through that problem; I’ll be sure to make a donation as soon as I get a new job (I promise). I haven’t added any widgets yet but I will – soon – when I figure out what minimal amount of information I want displayed on the sidebar.
Tomorrow is the first big cleaning day for the junk that I marked for the trash. Some of that stuff is already in piles on the floor waiting for Oscar the Grouch to take it away. And since I’ll have time (and more space) tomorrow, I’ll find even more to toss. I’m going to be good about the clothes, though, and donate what I don’t want to a local charity.
Once I free myself of all the physical clutter, I promise to get to that informational mess that is my hard drive. I’ll delete those files and I’m sure to free up gigabytes worth of space. Its not that I need the space, I just can’t find anything in the endless ‘To-Sort’ directories I’ve created from files that littered my ‘Desktop’ and ‘My Documents’ folders.
And once that’s all done, I’m going to retool the blog a bit. I want to clean up the categories and create a tree structure to better organize the posts. And then, I hope to be more prepared to write the way I want to.
If anyone has tips on how to de-clutter and transition into a mess-free life, please, let me know.