Writer's block, an owner's guide: (Not about writing) web software and hosting

Like the swallows, I’ve migrated again. It’s a story that probably makes no sense. But hey, I was born five thousand miles east of here and moving on is part of my Californian spirit.
A few days ago I noticed that someone had generously added his advertising code to the middle of the home page of my most important web site. I cleared that out right away and took some other corrective actions.

Next, I thought about prevention of future intrusions. One of my decisions was to remove the cms from the web server and have only static pages. So I installed Movable Type on my home ofice machine, planning to use it to create a site that would be mirrored up to the server.

I soon realized that it’s not straightforward to get MT running under Windows (I know, I know, I’ll dual boot the machine one day, but please don’t spoil the story). So I installed WordPress on the private machine instead. That installed easily and worked beautifully and I liked the interface.

I liked WP a lot. Too late I learned that it can’t create static pages. So my project was doomed. Did I give up? Not a chance. I’m a guy. Instead I decided to enlarge the project to include mirroring software that would query WP and pull static web pages out of it.
This workaround idea failed, because no program I tested could keep WP’s relative links straight in its mind. Absolute links wouldn’t have worked of course, because the whole point of this project was to have pages that were portable.

So I did give up on the whole thing in the end and decided to leave my cms on the web server.

But meanwhile I had fallen for WP. I installed it on the server, and within in a couple of days I had my two main sites moved over from MT and you are reading one of them now. If you see any problems let me know.

Now I’m clearing old static pages off the server. And I am moving stuff around to create a clean, rational system that I can slot future activities into. Of course all this will lead to some error-page hits. I apologize. But most of those will happen to the darn spiders that are still looking for pages I took down two years ago. Still on the to-do-for-fun list is an intelligent error handler to direct readers to the pages they probably wanted.

By the way, I’m still hosted by site5. The service is still smooth and full and makes me feel like a well equipped webmaster, the uptime is still excellent, the pricing is still keen, the response time to technical requests is still a matter of minutes, and I still recommend them.

Published on March 4, 2006 at 12:53 am. Linking to this article? Thank you! The permanent address is http://www.todayiwrite.com/journal/not-about-writing-web-software-and-hosting.html