It’s a new day and a new blog!
Previously, I had used blogengine.net for my websites. It worked very well. I already knew the programming language on which it’s built. The problem was Network Solutions. Specifically, it was their Windows web servers. For reasons they have not been able to find (in 3 years – THREE YEARS), the web server would periodically go down. The outage might be for a few minutes or a few days. I tried the nice, patient approach. I tried the raging, screaming profanities approach. The simple truth is that they just don’t care. Well, it could be that they are actually too incompetent to figure out the problem in 3 years. Either way, it wasn’t working for me.
Out with the old, in with the new.
My best alternative, therefore, was to find a new blog service that would run on a Unix server. The most popular appears to be WordPress. The problem is that it is based in php – not my wheelhouse. I’ve never even touched it before. Nevertheless, I finally bit the bullet and decided to give it my best effort. What you are seeing now is the result of a bit of research and trial and error. The biggest challenge was creating a theme. I just had to accept that I didn’t need to fully understand all the php code, as long as I learned what I needed to have in the template pages for my site to work. I had to let go of the stress and worry over rebuilding a long standing website and the learning curve of a new language/system.
So here we are with a new blog. Rather than import my old posts from my old blog (not an easy process going from and old version of blogengine to WP), I have kept my old site as static web pages. I kept the old posts, because there are a number of other sites that have links to them. I have attempted to retain the old URL’s, as best I can, while stripping out unnecessary links and pages. If, for some reason, you wish to see my older posts, you can find them here.
However, be warned: There is a high probability that you will encounter broken links. There are hundreds of pages and it will take time for me to clean them all up (if I ever even get to them all).
Check out the site. Let me know what you think. Constructive criticisms are always welcome.