Play In The Sandbox Before You Post
November 27, 2007
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Are you the type of blogger who seems to be always tweaking your blog, trying new plug-ins and themes, hoping to come up with the combination that makes it feel just perfect?Ever broken your blog doing this?
There’s not many plug-ins that will completely break WordPress anymore thanks to newer versions that check the code on the fly and de-activate the plug-in if something horrible is about to happen. But that theory isn’t foolproof. When this site was about a week and a half old, I discovered that things displayed strangely when you viewed the site using Internet Explorer. Turns out that it was an issue with my Top Commenters plug-in. Switching it out made the problem go away.
After that, I put up a “sandbox” version of my site, running on an Apache server on my machine at home. This isn’t something that’s accessible from the Internet. All posts that I make get re-posted on that site and I can see how things are going to look once they get posted. Obviously some things haven’t been included on the mirror, such as the MyBlogLog widget, because it’ll never get any traffic.
But the real beauty of this whole thing is that I can change themes, and install / uninstall widgets and plug-ins for testing without the possibility of bringing down my main site. This lessens the chance, although doesn’t completely eliminate, the possibility of disaster.
If you have the means to set up a mirror of your site on a server that’s not publicly accessible, I’d highly recommend doing so. If nothing else, you’ll be able to play around with a WordPress configuration that won’t cost you anything if you break it.
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November 27th, 2007 at 7:42 am
That’s a really good idea! I have an old Linux box here collecting dust when I could be using it for exactly that purpose.
-Caveman
November 27th, 2007 at 7:53 am
I was doing this before I switched from using my busted notebook to this new desktop PC. I need to set it up again. Thanks for the reminder.
November 27th, 2007 at 7:53 am
Thanks for your comment, Caveman. That’s an excellent use for an old Linux box.
November 27th, 2007 at 7:53 am
RT: No problem
November 27th, 2007 at 8:09 am
I have a subdomain of an unused domain setup for just this purpose. I like doing it this way since there won’t be any local network vs. Internet issues plus I can access the testing domain from anywhere.
November 27th, 2007 at 8:48 am
Never thought of that, Frank. A very unique solution.
November 27th, 2007 at 8:50 am
I didn’t think of it either, Frank. I’m must be getting slow. I think I’ll opt for a regular domain name or two and use them as add-on domains for my current one and test with those. It’ll have to wait until I’m no longer broke though.
December 11th, 2007 at 7:31 am
[...] deleted the theme and then went back into the theme manager. Thankfully this only happened on the sandbox blog, so nothing really went wrong with the main site. But then I got to wondering if the problem might [...]