Day by Day has Moved

Over the years this blog has changed in the type (and frequency) of content. I mean, I started it in 2002 when I was 10, being that my birth year is 1992. While at CSB/SJU I included fairly deep academic papers here, and discussion surrounding them. These days what I post here is largely far and few between, but quite substantive when I do post stories (the fact that I draft each post in Ulysses for a few days minimum and only transfer them to WordPress right at the time of posting is evidence of this). Not really the simple posts that this blog began with!

Over the years this blog has changed in the actual design of the site as well. Way early on it changed alongside a switch from Moveable Type to WordPress, which it uses to this day. Most recently, a few months ago, I switched the theme the site uses from an older 2010 iteration of our family’s custom theme (that I help manage the code of) to the 2013 iteration. This brought with it some minor design tweaks, but more importantly a unification of underlying code with other WordPress-based sites I help maintain (take a look at the Friends of St. Joesph website). Quite literally, all these sites’ copies of the theme use the same Git repository where the theme code truly resides and is distributed out of.

But that was just a precursor to the truly significant change that I made a week or so ago. No, there isn’t anything about the theme that has changed this time. Rather, for a hint look at the URL the blog is at. It no longer resides strictly within the alex.clst.org space that it used to be in since November 2002 (over the next few months I’ll be sifting what remains there into a more professional website, and leaving the rest as an archive). It is now at dbd.alex.clst.org, which is merely a front-end URL for the site truly living within wp.clst.org. For those of you that manage websites with self-hosted WordPress installations that URL may be a hint to you as to what is going on at this web space. Day by Day has joined a growing number of my family’s personal blogs and WP sites we run for smaller groups (including the Friends of St. Joseph) in our WordPress network. A WordPress network, or multi-site installation, is essentially a self-hosted WordPress.com-like website. Each site can look entirely independent, including having completely different URLs, but share the exact same WordPress installation, themes, and plugins. This is a change I’ve been contemplating for months, largely as it vastly simplifies managing software updates and other maintenance needs of the site, since those come “for free” with doing such tasks for the network as a whole.

The old URLs of Day by Day should redirect completely over to their new counterparts, including all deeper URLs into the site. This means that even the RSS feed just continues to work, but I do suggest that anyone who subscribes to Day by Day via RSS make sure that they’re subscribed using the new RSS feed just in case. Also, those of you who were subscribed via email or following on WordPress.com will need to resubscribe as there is no way for me to transfer those subscriptions, unfortunately. I don’t foresee any more significant systemic changes to my blog anytime in the near future (though minor theme modifications may occur even more often now that the site uses the exact copy of the theme used by other sites as well). Please do let me know if you see anything awry with the site, because there may be small issues persisting that I missed.