When you are tinkering...

[ses5909]

When you are upgrading or breaking things (tinkering), do you put up a notice letting people know what you are doing? Michael (http://www.problogdesign.com/accessibility/6-ways-to-help-when-your-blog-is-down/) made some good suggestions on what you can do!

[bobzilla]

It really depends on what it is I'm tinkering with. If I'm just playing about a little with widgets or graphics then I tend not to tell anyone I'm doing it. Once I'm happy with it I'd make a post explaining that I'd made changes.

If it was a full upgrade or the site was going to be down for more than 10 minutes I'd most likely post a warning up a day or so in advance and even then I'd only take the site down during a time where most its users wouldn't be using it anyway. An example would be a forum that I run for friends and family was to be upgraded from PHPBB2 to PHPBB3. I warned them it would happen and took the site down at 1am to upgrade the site. The next time anyone signed in it was all lovely and new for them.

I like the idea of giving them something else to do in the meantime especailly if it means they don't have to leave the site during that time just like DeviantArt did.

[splitbrain]

I only do it when there is some serious work is going on and the whole site will be down for more than a minute.

One thing you should remember is to send a correct HTTP response header (503 - Service temporary unavailable), to make sure search engine bots understand what is going on.

I usually use this script to do so: 503.sh [DokuWiki] (http://wiki.splitbrain.org/503.sh)

[SarahG]

In the past I've left a post saying that I'm tinkering and things may not work, however I now tend to get everything working on my localhost install of WP and then upload the new theme and use my admin theme preview plugin to view the theme myself online, check it all over before setting it live for everyone else.

If it's just updating little bits of the existing theme then I usually just set it so that only admin can see the additions.

[Jessi]

I can't say I've ever had my site down for more than an hour or two.....and that was only in the beginning when I'd somehow managed to *delete* my blog, lol, and had to go back through cached pages to fix it, lol....that was a long time ago, though, and just me trying to get used to Blogger itself. Since then, even when I do major HTML layout/template changes, I don't have to actually take the site down....so I don't bother.

[adalante]

If it's minor stuff than nope..i won't put up a notice, however if it's upgrade or redesign stuff than i'll use the maintenance-mode (http://sw-guide.de/wordpress/plugins/maintenance-mode/) plugin

[ses5909]

What a handy plugin Moses!!

[fatnewt]

I do the majority of my layout updates or 'tinkering' on a test server (usually my local machine) so I rarely need to take my blogs down for anything. It's usually a matter of copy/pasting changes or re-uploading template files for me.

Not bad ideas for the rare instances in which you do need to take things down.

[adalante]

What a handy plugin Moses!!

Yeah, indeed, i've used that plugin many times on my clients sites and mine.

[Oliver]

I have a copy of my blog on my dev server which I can play around with until my hearts content. Once I've tinkered with something and I like it and I'll get it uploaded on the live website and make a short post about it, i.e. what I've done and why.