While the site was down I also took the liberty in install a couple of new plugin’s that I had been testing. One called Akismet, which scans comments to check for spam, and another that allows me to automatically update the site in future, which should reduce downtime.

Now it’s not all perfect, some of the links are wobbly because they link to other RapidWeaver pages I had / have (I haven’t deleted the old site yet), and the tag’s and category information needs tidying up. However I will go back over these pots over the next few weeks and tidy them up.

Another area that I need to work on is the movie gallery. I have my personal video”s on YouTube and need a plugin that allows me to pull those in and display them. If anybody knows of a good one, let me know.

Otherwise if you want to check them out on the old RapidWeaver site, its still available here.

[UPDATE] Okay I have found a new plugin that seems to do a much better job, but it needs some permissions adjusted on the web server. I have a ticket logged with my web host and once they have made the required changes I will activate the new plugin.

During my good moments however I have been looking at ways to improve my web site and blog. If you have been following the “Playing with Technology” posts I have made you will have learnt that I am trying to get to the point where I am not reliant on a single machine, and can work regardless of where I am.

Well I am slowly making progress and one of the tasks that was really annoying me was that I was tied to my MacBook Pro and RapidWeaver to update my website. Now I love the ease of RapidWeaver but it means that I have to carry it with me. This is not ideal as it weights quite a bit and should anything happen to it, I am well and truly stuck. So after looking around I found WordPress, a great free blogging solution that was remarkably quick and simple to install.

I have been playing with WordPress and it seems to work well so I have decided to go with it for now. I am still keeping the RapidWeaver site which you can find here, until I have migrated everything over. Be sure to let me know how you find the new site, and any problems you experience, as I am still learning the software and there”s quite a lot to learn.

One of the biggest items to migrate is my Photo Library. Now this is one of the area”s I still haven”t figured out how manage completely, but I am getting there in a round about way. At home I use iPhoto from Apple. I have my main photo library on my Mac Mini and within RapidWeaver I simply created a new Photo page and selected the pictures from iPhoto. Now that I am looking to stop using RapidWeaver I needed a way to do this with WordPress. I found a plugin for WordPress called FlickrExport (£12) that allows you to upload your iPhoto pictures to Yahoo”s Flickr service. Now I have been playing with Flickr for a while and it”s Pro Service is pretty good value at $25 a year. Flickr is basically an online photo gallery, like Google”s Picasa. The plugin then allows you to display the photo”s you have in your Flickr albums on your WordPress site.

I am in the process of uploading my photo”s to Flickr, and as there are quite a few this is going to take a while, but you should start to see them appear shortly. One part I haven”t quite figured out yet is when I am on the road I can upload my photo”s to Flickr but I now need to figure out how I bring the photo”s from Flickr back into iPhoto.

Well for those that didn’t know I converted to the Mac (MacBook Pro) about a year ago. On the Mac I use RapidWeaver from RealMacSoftware to keep my personal website and blog up to date. Now I love RapidWeaver as it’s easy to use and extremely versatile, but one thing that does annoy me is that it doesn’t seem to like publishing a lot of files over a slow link.

Let me explain a little, while the man from Jaguar goes off to find me a new car battery. In India I have a 2 Mbps DSL line. Now when I say 2 Mbps line what I really mean is I have a line that at some point in the future might actually start to offer 2 Mbps transfer rates and I might at some point be able to get an upstream rate that is marginally quicker than a fax machine. Not that that is really RapidWeavers fault, but I recently decided to tidy up the site a little, area’s like the Photo Gallery where becoming a little cluttered and I wanted to simplify the structure a little. So I set about creating an archive area and moving some pages around, all of which was very easy using RapidWeaver, but when I came to publish the site there were over 3000 pages that needed to be re-published. So I clicked the publish button and RapidWeaver started to weave its magic. The only problem was that it never got beyond the first few hundred pages before it through up an FTP error.

So frustrated I kept hitting the publish button and RapidWeaver went through the motions, but I was never quite convinced that it was doing what it said it was doing. So last night I decided to take the plunge and after checking everything was where I wanted it to be and saving the site project file ten times I cleared the publishing cache and marked all the paged as changed, I FTP’ed to my website and deleted the entire contents. I then went back to RapidWeaver and clicked the publish buttons. RapidWeaver went through the export phase, and then advised me that 5134 pages need to be uploaded, and off I went to bed (with a doubt or two in my mind).

I woke up this morning to find that every single page had uploaded and not one error was encountered. I thanked my 22 Mbps Internet line and the Internet gods. I checked the site and everything seems to be there, even my newly implemented Google Analytics code and FavIcon.

What’s does that mean to users of the site? Well not much really, but what it should mean is that there are no broken links (Google Web Tools showed four) and that everything is a little less cluttered. If you have bookmarked anything other than the home page you might find those links don’t work as I have tidied up the file structure a little too, but everything does feel a lot more ordered; to me at least.

If you do have any problems let me know via the Contact Form. Otherwise enjoy!