Things have been a little crazy in Otaku Journalist land. At one point two weeks ago, I counted that I had six different jobs. I was maintaining multiple WordPress sites, writing a curriculum for my WordPress course, putting the finishing touches on my next book, and of course reporting for ReadWrite, blogging, and maintaining my business as usual.

Last week, however, was just the opposite. It seemed like everything finished up at once. Now I’m back to normal and feel like I have way too much time on my hands.

I decided to put that time to good use by doing some maintenance around my blog. Otaku Journalist is nearly five and I’ve had a list of things I’ve needed to update and fix.

Anyone who’s been running a blog for a awhile can relate to how upkeep slips through the cracks. So I’m sharing some tips for keeping an old blog running like new:

Update the user experience

You might notice some ever-so-slight changes to the look and feel of Otaku Journalist. That’s because I finally set up a child theme for it.

WordPress sites get their appearance information from themes, templates designed by developers all over the world. If you know a little HTML and CSS, you can customize your theme’s design. But when the original developer spots a bug or a security issue, you need to update your theme and lose all those custom design changes. So as a result of doing this, I hadn’t been updating my theme and it’s been getting slowly buggier.

The alternative is to create a child theme, a theme that inherits the functions of the developer’s theme, but can host its own custom design. This is so easy, it’s something I taught my WordPress bootcamp how to do in one weekend. But I had been putting it off until now. Now the site is running Purple Pro Child so I can update Purple Pro whenever its developer does.

Another user experience change? I’ve finally added Disqus comments. I’ve been meaning to do this since the reader survey in May. Not everyone likes Disqus, but let’s try them out for a bit and see if they make commenting less of an ordeal. You can finally edit your own comments!

But seriously, I wish I had installed Disqus for WordPress much earlier. It took almost 24 hours to migrate my existing 2,500+ comments to the new system!

Optimize your site speed

With five years of posts, images, and data, Otaku Journalist is getting bulky. I’ve started to notice page loading speeds suffer as a result.

The first thing I did was go to Page Speed Grader to see what was taking so long. Before I did anything, it was taking nearly 6 seconds to load, which is noticeably slow. And after assessing the issues, I installed a couple useful WordPress plugins:

• W3 Total Cache, a plug-in that caches elements on your page to improve loading time.
• EWWW Image Optimizer, a bulk image lossless compressor. It took an hour for it to go through every image ever seen on Otaku Journalist and compress it.
• Leverage Browser Caching Ninjas, a one-hit wonder that does for free what W3 Total Cache will only do in the paid upgrade.

Now each page comes up in about 3 seconds, cutting load time in two with just a few installs.

Update static pages

I (usually) update my blog once a week, but when’s the last time I even looked at my About pages? And these are the vital first links on my site that new visitors click!

Two of them, About the Site and About the Author, were still linking to my non-existent digital journalism guides instead of my new book. Tiny missteps like that can keep new readers from even realizing I have a book out there at all.

Most of the changes, however, I made to my portfolio site. It was so out of date it didn’t even list my business name on my resume or display any portfolio pieces later than February, which probably makes it look to potential employers like I’ve been out of work that whole time.

Maybe this tip seems obvious to you. But I always forget that even though these static pages seem old to me, they’re brand new to first-time readers and absolutely essential to keep up.

I hope you’re enjoying the new and improved Otaku Journalist! What are some regular maintenance you do to keep up your blog?