Dude, go check out the upgraded Contest Blogger Forum

Today was a pretty exciting, busy, hectic, panicky and—in the end—fulfilling day for Contest Blogger, dudes and dudettes!  For weeks we had been looking forward to the release of the new version of Simple:Press, which is the plugin that we use to run the Contest Blogger Forum, and it finally became available for download this morning.

First things first: Simple:Press is, without a doubt, the most amazing WordPress plugin ever, and its creator, Andy, deserves a lot of praise for putting it together.  If you’re looking for a simple and fun way to add a forum to your blog, then go download Simple:Press right away, dude. We sent Andy a small tip today to let him buy a beer on us, but he deserves a lot more for making such a cool plugin available to the public for free.

Anyway, we downloaded the new version of Simple:Press and installed it on Contest Blogger, and everything was going pretty cool.  The new version lets you put your own icons next to forums and groups, so we spent most of the morning designing and uploading .png files (dude, go check them out, they’re rad). 

Then disaster hit in the early afternoon, when I decided to go and change the default homepage I had set in my WordPress admin panel and Contest Blogger totally crashed.  And, of course, I couldn’t log back into the admin anymore, either. 

Yah, a big bummer, and my apologies to anyone who tried to access the Contest Blogger Forum while it was down for a few hours.  Long story short: thank God for my wife, who convinced me to calm down and take a deep breath to figure out how to fix things.  And a huge thanks to BlueHost, my hosting service, who helped us get things up and running again.  They have totally awesome customer service, and I’d recommend them to anyone.

First lesson learned: don’t go screwing around with stuff in your WordPress Admin Panel that you don’t fully understand yet.  Second lesson learned: no matter how bad things seem to get, calm yourself down and you’ll probably be able to come up with a way to fix it.

Yah, I’ll shut up already.  Go check out the upgraded Contest Blogger Forum if you haven’t yet, dude.