End of Year Cleaning

So after spending so much time hunting down the malware PHP file on the site, I decided it was time to clean up. As Steve pointed out in the comments on that post, there are some steps I should be taking, like getting rid of old plugins and unused themes, that I had gotten lazy about, and in the midst of clearing those out I came to another realization. The file/folder structure of the site had gotten out of control. Problem one was the Blogger stuff. You see, I ran this site as a Blogger blog for over 8 years. Blogger publishes static HTML pages. When I switched over to WordPress in 2010, I didn’t want to suddenly break any links to those pages, so I imported all of the posts into WordPress, but I left the HTML pages out there. That created two problems, that I know of. First was a mass of folders and archives HTML files that didn’t ever get updated, and the second was that I might very well have been on Google’s naughty list for having duplicate content.

Looking through my logs though, I could see that it was a rare day indeed that anyone actually visited any of those pages, so while it may mean there are bunches of broken links out there, apparently no one was visiting them any way. So they’ve gone along with unused plugins, themes, and anything else I wasn’t using, across all of my sites.

So now that things are looking a bit more tidy around here, maybe I can start some new testing and experimentation in 2014? Looking forward to investigating the possibilities!

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