Blog Tech

Changes

The Castle
~ Guy Hall ~ Leave a comment

You might have noticed that I lost several months of posts. To make a long story short, I switched hosts. The old hosting service was slow. My blog would take seconds to load. Longer than was acceptable. But the learning curve for migrating a site from one service to another was steeper than I could handle, taking a few months to figure things out. After many hours this morning I managed to rectify the problem. I am now fully with Bluehost, a WordPress recommended hosting service which is providing fast service. Instead of the approximately 10 seconds to load, it’s almost instantaneous.

Damn! I used to wait an eternity for a preview to load. It’s instantaneous now. Same with loading pictures from the library, what took from 10 to 20 seconds now is instant. My efforts at blogging have become easier.

UPDATE: It looks like I did something wrong and caused my site to not load at the proper addy. Thanks to the excellent support team at Bluehost, they got it up and running! Yea!!!!!!

Theme Adjustments Completed!

~ Guy Hall

I’ve spent my Sunday Morning playing around with WordPress Themes. I’ve settled on the Sandalwood Theme. Simple, uncomplicated, and modern. Plus, I added a picture of Two Harbors, Minnesota, to the header. It’s taken from the breakwater barrier. Tina and I had a picnic there a year or so ago. Afterward, we took a walk to the end of the barrier. There are a few other pictures from that day.

New Theme

~ Guy Hall

Just trying on a new outfit. Plus I made some other minor adjustments to the way posts are displayed on other sites, such as Facebook.

New Social Platform

~ Guy Hall

So, a new Social Platform is looking to compete against the Evil Mugtome (Facebook). One point in this new platform’s favor is the ability to prevent people from downloading your pictures. Photographers will appreciate that critical fact. You want to get them out there, but you don’t want them used without your permission. Another point in their favor – easy editing of your profile. And I mean extremely easy. I already have a profile on the site, so I have first-hand experience.

Now, I don’t expect Evil Mugtome to die anytime soon. Hell, even MySpace still exists. But I suspect it will not dominate forever. And MeWe looks to be doing all the right things to compete with Evil Mugtome. Unlike Facebook’s meteoric rise, MeWe seems to be a bit more gradual, though by no means slow. And they look to supply a service to the people who use the platform as opposed to the advertisers. And there are some in-platform purchases you can make, such as buy emojis and stickers. And you can purchase a subscription page to support your business. However, there appear to be no ads.

Well, no ads other than for the platform itself. But that’s understandable. You have to drum up business.

I’m A Sharing!

~ Guy Hall

This is just a quick post to test the social sharing of Jetpack, a plugin for WordPress that automatically shares my posts with all sorts of social media.

Testing a Plugin

~ Guy Hall

Trying a new plugin that is supposed to automatically submit my blog posts to Facebook. Hoping it works.

And it didn’t work because I don’t have an https site. Bastards.

Jet Pack Gone

~ Guy Hall

Well, interestingly enough, now that I’ve deleted the Jet Pack plugin from my blog it seems to run faster. I also deleted my WordPress account, which also seemed to be dragging down my blog. Even my media library, which used to hang up some days and always was slow loading now is lightning fast.

So, to any of my readers out there (which may have dramatically dropped now that I don’t have a subscription option with the removal of Jet Pack) with WordPress blogs who use Jet Pack how does it work for you?