…I spent about half of the available time over the weekend post processing and triaging photos from our April 2015 trip to support Lorna’s summer scrapbooking activities.
On the technical side, I got XAMPP fully installed and configured on my Ubuntu linux box and pulled a complete snapshot of my web hosting over and loaded it up. the database loads were completed without a hitch and the file transfers completed with a few stalls using <code>wget -m</code>.
As of this morning, I have a fully functional mirror of all of the content on my blog up and running. I need to burn the tarball to a blue-ray disk (around 9GB so DVD won’t hack it) tonight. The site does seem to know that it lives at ninecrows.com because any link on the mirror transfers directly to my real site. Got to figure out where that’s stored and fix it as the next step.
Once that’s done I can move on to testing out mod-rewrite rules for redirecting the landing spot to my landing area wordpress instance so that I can point people to http://ninecrows.com rather than one of the specific blogs. Looks a bit messy and likely somewhat finicky in exact configuration, but shouldn’t be hard to get right using my local mirror.
At the end of last week, a friend looked at this blog and asked how it was set up.
Origins
This all started in 2011 and it started with email. I had maintained a long term stable email address with MV communications. MV had been a major ISP in southern New Hampshire and by 2010 that business was nearly gone. When they finally went under I looked at my options for keeping a stable identity on the internet.
In the end I realized that buying a domain name and getting a web hosting was likely the best way to ensure that I had a permanent address on the internet and open up options beyond that. I don’t remember doing a huge amount of research on hosting companies, but I ended up using GoDaddy and so far have been happy with their service.
I enabled the WordPress ‘JetPack’ plug-in that comes with the software (but is disabled by default) and it appears that fixes the issues I had with the built in image galleries. Unless someone finds issues with what is currently up here, I’ll stick with that.
I would like to be able to control the size and shape of the featured images at the top of each post better. I may try some other themes over the next couple of weeks to see if I can get a layout I like better.
I’m also toying with splitting off the picture galleries from the main blog as a separate wordpress instance that only hosts pictures. Feedback is welcome…there will probably be a number of adjustments here over the next bit of time as I try to make the site more friendly and useful to me.
I just created a ‘landing page’ wordpress instance. I expect to use the web server’s rewrite capability to point the main page (http://ninecrows.com) to this landing page instance and then set up the landing page as a static WordPress instance with the main page pointing to career and blog instances (and any others I may create).
I’m still considering whether I should spawn off any other instances…for the moment I’ll hold off as I’d rather not wind up with too much clutter.
The default gallery and light-box support in wordpress seems a bit broken. It doesn’t sequence through images very well (grabs things in the light box view that aren’t in the selected gallery) and provides few options for layout.
So far the choices I’ve seen for plug-ins are better, but every one I’ve seen has issues that I either can’t see how to resolve or might be resolved by the paid version. I’m reluctant to start buying gallery plug-ins until I find one that meets my needs. I have one that I bought (relatively inexpensive so I’m not concerned) that is close. I’m beginning so suspect I’ll need to write my own after looking at hos the other ones out there work to get an idea of what is needed.
