Dang it. I’ve learned my lesson. It _is_ possible to have too many toys, especially when some of those ‘toys’ involve badly written code.

Sometime in the course of the next week, I think I will be giving Writer’s Blog an overhaul. For starters, I’m going to trim my number of plugins being used down to a somewhat more manageable number – the current count stands at 46 active. A fair number of these will stay in place as they are, though I’ll be looking to see if any have been updated, since I use them on a daily basis as integral parts of my blogging process. The rest, however, will get trimmed away. Most of them are sidebar fodder, anyway.

The reason behind this decision is because at least one of these plugins is built on bad coding. As a result I’ve noticed that my site’s service keeps getting interrupted while the CPU resets itself. Apparently, a script somewhere keeps overtaxing my server by not shutting itself off when it’s supposed to. I’ve checked the error logs, but no one thing seems to stand out. This is a pretty new problem that’s started only the last week, so I have to assume that it has something to do with one of the more recent plugins I’ve installed. Either that, or traffic to my site has increased quite a bit, but I find that explanation less likely.

The other bit I think I’m going to do is either find or create a different to use here. I do love the Navigation theme and it will always hold a special place in my heart. Heck, I even built a bbPress theme that will partner with it. And I’m sure I’ll trot it out again at some point down the road. But I think I’d like to find something that’s a bit more minimalistic – plain, simple, and fast. And since I’m already going to be shutting a number of sidebar plugins off to try to help ease off server loads, I might even be able to drop back down to a 2-column theme. I’m just not sure, yet, what sort of layout I want for my blog, so I’m not sure if I’ll be looking for a theme that already exists or if I’ll custom-tailor something. I’ll likely have to grab a sheet of paper and pencil and layout what things I want to appear on the site, where on the page I want it to sit, and what I want it to look like. From there, that should guide my ultimate decision.

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