NPDemers.net

Well, the site itself works just fine, but it looks like there were a few issues left to deal with.

First, Wordpress wasn’t returning the right status code (404) when a requested page couldn’t be found. That was easily fixed. Returning the correct HTTP status is not too important for human browsers but is a huge deal for search engines because when you’re indexing the Web you need to know which pages actually exist.

Well, hey, that was pretty painless. I was worried about having to move my Wordpress installation from one directory to another, but it went off very smoothly. Of course, then I had to do a bit of cleaning up, re-upload my images, and so on.

So here we are. 6+ months of work, on and off at times, have finally paid off.

So… I’ve got two options here, neither of them totally satisfactory.

1) Use the built-in Wordpress search function. It’s pretty basic, though you can install plugins to make it search pages as well as posts, and nicely highlight search terms on the results page. Pro: it only searches post/page content, and title (this annoyed me before). Which in fact is a bit of a con, because now I may want to search the comments.

I’m still working on the new site design. It’s slow. And frustrating. I want to do more than just giving my site a face lift, but honestly it’s damn hard to be creative when I’m still learning the tools. So I experiment. And I play. I add stuff. And I subtract.

Subtracting’s important. There comes a point when pretty styles and frills are just too distracting, too showing, too hard to maintain, too much.

Okay, The Tick vs. Reno, Nevada is far from my favourite from Season Two (that would be Grandpa Wore Tights, with its brilliantly hilarious parody of Golden Age heroes), but the title seemed appropriate. After a hiatus of a few weeks I’m back at work on my site redesign, and making good progress. I’ve got a pretty good structure for the blog and assorted pages, though there are still some open questions and many tweaks to be done. And, I’ve started looking at customising my photo galleries. Yes, it can be done.

It started when my old camera conked out. No display in shooting mode, no images recorded. Ah, we had some good times these 4 years, but I guess nothing lasts forever. So I bought a new one. And then I started thinking more about photos, and the work I have to do to put them online.

Rejoice, for I bring you a version change. Here’s what’s new:

A new colour scheme, inspired by my recently repainted condo.
A search function, powered by Google. One of these days I may implement one on my own.

I know, it’s been a while, but on the bright side I’ve made the changes I promised last year. Dynamic pages, powered by PHP with a MySQL backend. Cruft-free URLs. A new look and layout. A complete reorg of the writing section. Oh, and a new host. I didn’t promise that eight months ago, because I was still hosting the site on my own iMac. Experience has taught me that that isn’t the safest route.

I’m currently in the middle of a big site redesign. The ball got rolling last month when I changed the index page to add a little PHP script. Nothing too fancy, but it got my feet wet. So here’s what’s going to happen:

So I’ve been fiddling with the site’s styles a bit. Partly to clean up the stylesheets, removing redundant definitions and adding more comments so I’ll have an easier time maintaining them in the future, and partly to deal with some of IE’s frackin’ display issues. Stupid IE.

I control the horizontal. I control the vertical.

Ladies and gentlemen, as of this weekend, I am self-hosting my site. Hey, I’ve had the hardware and the software for months now. In that time I’ve been reading up on what I need to configure and run my own Web server, and I’m finally ready to take the leap.