Category Archives: Site Technical Stuff

Considering adding a separate pictures blog at ninecrows

I’ve been busy with other things lately have not been taking or post-processing many pictures. I’m looking at getting some of that going again and getting a small gallery of my shots up on the site here.

I’ve considered adding a separate picture gallery wordpress instance in the past. To date I’ve kept things here on the discussion blog. I think that if I’m going to post more than the occasional picture or set of pictures that a free-standing blog instance would do the job better.

More to  come as this gells…

Landing page is now in place…

CrowsIconbut is not all that pretty. The http://ninecrows.com URL now redirects to landingpage which is a static page based wordpress instance.

The instance at landing page is very spartan at the moment. Just two links and a bit of text. I’ll need to get some artwork built up to make it more welcoming and accessible soon. Expect some experimentation as I figure out how to best support the landing page function.

I wound up using a redirect rather than mod_rewrite. I’m not sure why, but the rewrite rule that worked on my local linux mirror of the site did not work at all on my hosted site. I’ll have to look into that at some future date. For now, what is there should do the job nicely.

Local Mirror is now Working…

Over the weekend I thought I had my local site mirror up and running on my Ubuntu Linux machine (leviathan). Yesterday evening it became clear to me that while the site looked ok at the landing page, it knew that it was at ninecrows.com and not leviathan and it was pulling database information from the main hosting and not the local MariaDB instance (update a page on the main site and see the changes on leviathan tells the whole story). Continue reading Local Mirror is now Working…

Long weekend, some progress…

…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.

This Blog and How We Got Here

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.

Continue reading This Blog and How We Got Here

Enabled ‘JetPack’ for Gallery Support

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.

Looking for a good image gallery plug-in

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.