Perfect Duluth Day will celebrate 20 years of being Duluth’s Duluthiest website on June 29, 2023. At some point this year, we’ll be relaunching the site under a new WordPress theme and hoping we don’t break everything in the process. But before we get further into explaining that, we lead with the standard plug for donations to ensure the whole operation remains solvent.

So if you appreciate the thorough listings of hoopla on the PDD Calendar and/or the features on the PDD Blog, kindly drop a few bucks in the PayPal account.

Yes, PDD does receive income from advertising, but it’s never been enough to pay anything close to living wages. So we occasionally put out these low-pressure nudges for donations. Follow this link for more info about our fundraising.

Now, what does it mean that PDD is changing it’s WordPress theme? Hopefully not very much to readers. The plan is to make a fairly seamless transition to a rebuilt website that functions pretty much the same as the current site. But behind the scenes it means a lot of work to reconstruct the site and migrate all the old data. Once the job is done, any number of unforeseen problems will need to be troubleshot in the days that follow. So things might get briefly messy.

Why undertake this big job if there really isn’t a plan to change much? Well, we’ve been on the same Word Press theme for eight years, and when things get old they start to break. So basically we’re risking breaking some things on purpose in order to avoid them breaking on their own when we don’t expect it.

This will be the fourth big technology update to PDD during its two decades. The site was launched on June 29, 2003 on the Blogger platform. It switched to Movable Type on Sept. 8, 2005. The move to WordPress happened on Jan. 30, 2009. And on Aug. 25, 2014 a switch was made from the Zeke WordPress theme to Feather.

Apologies for the geekspeak, but this feature is called “shop talk” for a reason. The hope is to strike the proper balance of transparency and sharing of vision without providing so much detail that we bore the hell out of you. If you want to know more, please ask. If you don’t, we don’t blame you.