Effective today, I’ve just installed a plugin called Device Theme Switcher, which enables a site visitor to switch from viewing this site as a regular full website to a mobile version. If you look on the right sidebar underneath the Search form, you will see the links to switch themes based on your device.

I’m using a very plain theme for the mobile version of this site: Carrington Mobile by Crowd Favorite. It does the job for now, until I get around to customizing it a little bit more. That will be another project to complete in the not to distant future.

I know I posted a while back that I thought the Internet should be viewed on a large screen, but businesses that don’t have mobile versions of their sites are going to be losing out eventually, as more and more busy people access the Internet with their devices. This trend is not going to go away anytime soon.

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Stopping online piracy is one thing, but this new law (SOPA) would give the US Dept. of Justice and the copyright holders the power to implement such actions as barring online advertising networks and payment processors such as PayPal from conducting business with the alleged infringing website, barring search engines from linking to such sites, and requiring Internet service providers to block access to such sites.

So what, you may think. Crime should be punished and I agree.

But let’s say, for example, that one of my advertisers, or someone I link to is committing copyright infringement, this new law would mean they could shut down or at least blacklist my site, even if I had no idea about any of it. They could even try to charge me with facilitating copyright infringement just by virtue of linking to the sites. They could shut down my website ClassicRockLover.com if one of the videos I embedded on that blog is a copyright infringement, even though I had the permission from YouTube to embed it. For that matter, they could even try to shut down YouTube, because it allowed the video in the first place, though Google, unlike me, has a great legal team and I think there would be a very interesting legal battle.

But my point is, this new law could simply cripple the Internet. And as much as I think copyright infringement is wrong, in my humble opinion, they should put more effort into shutting down child porn sites, stopping identity theft, and locating those idiots who create viruses and trojans. This new law is quite simply over the top and many online groups are completely against it and are protesting it.

If you understand at all what this law really means, you should protest it too or at least spread awareness about it on Facebook, Twitter, your blogs. I’m not American, so I can’t write to my Congressmen, but my American friends can. And to my American friends I say this: I really like you all, but your politicians suck (except for Ron Paul). And the heavy-handedness of your American foreign policies is going to bite you in the butt – yet again.

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On January 3, 2012, WordPress released their latest version – 3.3.1. I know many of you are reluctant to upgrade because you think perhaps that your plugins or themes won’t work.

First of all, it is very rare that a theme won’t work with any WordPress upgrades. I have old themes that I developed in 2006 and 2007 that still work perfectly fine. They are just missing the threaded comments. That’s all. Not such a big deal, right?

Plugin compatibility is quite another challenge when upgrading WordPress. I have found that every plugin I use still works fine, though, and I tend to keep everything up to date.

But one visit to the WordPress support forums is enough to realize that I am very fortunate. Because there are always many people who have problems with upgrades.

I often wonder whether some of their woes are caused by crappy web hosting providers running out of resources to host robust database-driven web sites and last year I mentioned that switching to a web host that has LiteSpeed, made all the difference in the world to me. After all, this blog is 6 years old. That’s a lot of content and database queries. So I needed a more stable hosting solution.

Enough about web hosting and let’s get back to the question of whether or not to upgrade your WordPress version. My personal opinion is that no matter what glitches you may run into, always upgrade to the latest version of WordPress. Most often, upgrades include security fixes that are really important – more important than if your favorite plugin works.

Plugins are great to have but isn’t your site’s security more important? Always backup your blog’s database before an upgrade, so that if something drastic happens, you can always revert back fairly easily.

WordPress is still, in my humble opinion, the best open source software for the web ever released. Don’t neglect the little maintenance issues, and you too will have a a great website that will serve you and your site’s visitors for years and years.

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