Apologies if you’ve hit the ugly “under construction” or 404 pages on Pixel Ellipsis in the last day or so. With a little encouragement from the C3 community, I finally decided to take the plunge and request that my web hosting provider upgrade me from PHP 4 to PHP 5. This upgrade required a complete site migration to a new server, so that’s what’s been keeping me fretting with anxiety for the last two days! Slow internet here made backing everything up a drawn-out nightmare, and the re-uploading was just as bad. But just when it looked like everything ported over ok, WordPress threw me a white screen of death! Luckily with a bit of tinkering and a whole lot of googling, I found the naughty plugin that caused the error, so I’ve deleted the culprit plugin and we are now back online!

Please let me know if you run into any weird bugs on Pixel Ellipsis; I’ll be fine-tuning the backend over the next few days so please bear with me as I whip the site into optimal shape!

Update (3/12/11): Ok, back for real now after updating/re-hacking the Gallery WordPress theme ^^; The tweaking will continue, but the undercon cow *should* be retired for a good long while. Sorry about the extra downtime everyone!

I’ve been trying to find a good search plugin that’ll buff up WordPress’ default search, which as most of you know isn’t the best search around. The Search Everything plugin looked like a strong contender, but I couldn’t get the multiple search term to work for unregistered users – which is everyone apart from me. I ended up opting for the Search Tags plugin, which includes post tags and categories to the search. So now if you search for “studio ghibli” or “Satoshi Kon” on Pixel Ellipsis, you should be turning up more relevant wallpapers instead of the nothingness or the crap based on post content that was showing up before. Looking back at some of my old wallpapers’ descriptions, I sure used to be awfully emo/verbose, which is a terrible combination right there that was sure to guarantee crappy search results…

Update: Also added the WP-PageNavi plugin for better pagination + easier navigation. Maybe I’m starting to get a little too plugin happy here…

Update 2: And, spiffed up the wallpaper category pages with plot summaries. I hadn’t realized how many (post) apocalyptic series crap had walled until now, like Eden, Texhnolyze, or Wonderful Days…

I’ve been sneaking changes in to Pixel Ellipsis. Firstly, in single wallpaper posts I pulled out the “next post/previous post” navigational links and substituted in “related walls.” The relation isn’t always perfect, and sometimes it makes me go “huh?” But I think it makes for more interesting browsing, especially when it links to some of the older wallpapers in the pixel ellipsis trove.

The second change is pretty obvious. I removed the “Tweet This” link on single wallpaper posts since the shortened urls don’t seem to be working any more, and installed the awesome SexyBookmarks WordPress plugin to make sharing THAT much easier (and sexier) on Pixel Ellipsis. So share away, because it shows that you care