May 15

I’ve got to briefly give Kudos to Bluehost.com.  They are the web hosting company that I use for this website.  Since I switched to WordPress and there is a WordPress iPhone app I wanted to try it out.  Well, the fact that my SSL certificate was both self-signed and expired finally became important.  The WordPress app wouldn’t work with this site due to that cert.

Thankfully, I remembered an article on Arstechnica.com about a company that provides basic SSL certs for free.  So I went through the process, got my certificate, and then I created a help ticket with Bluehost to get it installed.  They installed it within minutes.  They’re service has always been good, but they set a record for turn around time today.  I recommend them if you need hosting.

Tagged with:
May 15

Welcome to the new and improved Westphals.net!

For those few of you out there that actually follow this site, maybe you’re wondering how this can be new and improved.  Well, mostly because it’s easier to use.  The hope is that making it easier to use will lead us to post things more often.  Instead of dumping photos onto the site once every six months, maybe it can be more often.  Maybe even much more often.  Who knows.

The software that ran the old site was a combination of the Drupal Content Management System and the Gallery 2 Image Gallery.  It was an very powerful combination, but it was complicated and difficult to maintain.  Plus the workflow of adding images to the gallery and then writing blog posts about them was tedious.  The end result is that it was out-of-date and I didn’t post stuff very often.

The software running this new site is WordPress.  I’ve only been working with is for about a week now, but I’m hooked.  Keeping it up-to-date is much easier.  Adding themes is easy.  I found a theme that I liked, but it didn’t quite display images the way I wanted.  It only took a few hours to figure out how to modify the theme to do it just as I wanted.

I intend to use this new site as a blog with lots of pictures in it.  I’ll post the pictures right into the blog itself.  You can click on an image to go to a page with more details about the image.  Click on the image on that page, and you can get the full size version of the picture.  If you want it.

WordPress even has an iPhone app that I can use to post pictures right from the phone.

With this new site you can comment on posts without having to have an account on the site.  The first time you comment it’ll have to be approved.  After that it should be automatic for most comments.

If you were following the old site via RSS, you’ll need to remove the old feed and add the new feed in your RSS reader.  The URL for the feed is different.

I may start adding backdated posts to this site that include the pictures that were part of the old site.  That will certainly take a while.  Unless I get around to moving everything into the new site you can still access the old version at http://www.westphals.net/oldsite/.

I guess that’s about it.  Look for more to come.

Tagged with:
preload preload preload