Moving to a New Interface

After 9 plus years at this old page, I have decided to make a bit of a departure. I will be keeping things clean and plain and the new Squarespace 7 site I have got would provide me with all that. This site will remain open and maintained as the legacy stuff I have here are far too precious. It chronicled my children growing up and through the 1000+ entries, I have built up my own diaries. Please click here or on the photo above to go to my new dedicated blog page harisrahman.blog.

The New Mix

It was time to update my blog. Giving it some face lift. Over the last couple of weeks I have been exploring other provider and looking around if it would be easy to port my blog.

Unfortunately it wasn't as straight forward as I thought.

My blog is now seven and a half years old with more than 1500 entries. It had been running on the Version 5 of Squarespace since day one. The current Squarespace version is version 7. I was given a special discount for a version 6 account after doing some beta testing for the company. And all version 6s were automatically upgraded to version 7. Version 5 however ran on a completely different architecture. Upgrading would take a lot of effort, not to mention having to reformat all my extensions and links. It was just an impossible task.

So, I explored format.com among others and felt that they had potential, and that was before I decided to have another look at my discounted account.

After fiddling with them for a while, I decided to run it as a parallel blog, concentrating on photography. And fotobyharis.com was conceived. To be honest I was rather surprised at what the new Squarespace features were capable of. The blog look mighty impressive compared to the basic tools of 2009. Editing was slightly complicated, but once mastered, it was much more logical than I thought.

For the time being, all the photoblog contents were the ones already uploaded to the main blog. But should there have any photography slant to them - which would be the majority - they get ported across to the photoblog, with higher resolution photos, as well as a more expansive layout.

The site still needed some tweaking, and I had been taking lessons from Lynda.com to sharpen up my skills. Hopefully with more practice, I could make the design look a lot better …..

Been Behind

I must say I had been occupied in the last few weeks and blogging had fast becoming a chore. I spent some of my free times playing EVE Online as well after picking up where I left during the recent Raya break.

So, I had some backlog of stories to post and one thing led to another. But otherwise things had been good and for the this band the next couple of months, due to shortage in number of staff, I had to do some extra calls.

Better get back to the blog then...

Catching Up with the Blog

I have been enjoying too much of my down time and basically just relaxing. TV took much of my time and I had been behind with the blog.

A lot of the stories going back to before Raya remained to be told, so I was slowly catching up with things. Should be up to date by the weekend ...

Some Revamping

It had been a while since I last tinker with the blog. To be quite honest, I couldn't be bothered with the hassle of it. Most of the time, things ran fine - as promised by Squarespace when I singed up 6 years ago.

I could do with a bit of customising but since the platform was upgraded to version 7 - mine is still at version 5 - some of the visual upgrade had been long time coming. I thought about having a third party doing a bit of sprucing up on the blog but in the end, couldn't even get to that!

So, while looking around, I felt that the indexing system of the blog could do with a bit of manual editing. So, I decided to look back at all of the entry - at my own pace obviously - and index them myself. Some may need deleting since the photos were missing etc, some would need updating of the photos, but most of them looked good to go. I only managed to go back to late 2014 so far. Still 5 more years worth of entries needing looking into. That should keep me busy for the coming few weeks ....