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 …..

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 ....

Broken SquareSpace

I have been using SquareSpace for more than 5 years and with innovation, there was bound to be issued. And that certainly what happened to the iOS app for the blogging platform.

The app now no longer support Square space version 5 which my blog still used - because that was the most advanced version back in 2009.

SquareSpace released version 6 of the program back in 2011 and I was one of the beta tester for the new update. I used it for close to 6 months before the version matured and went out of beta. Over the years, development of version 5 were put in the back burners. And the main problem was, those two versions were not compatible. Upgrading from 5 to 6 did take plenty of work.

I decided against updating this blog and now I found myself having to either use the Android version of the SquareSpace app, which I was also a beta tester, or updating it manually on the web. The app were no longer available for download from iTunes, so I my have to update my iPhone manually from the Mac to get the old app back.

It was a pain. What would happen when version 7 come along? There would be another app update and those using the older version may suffer the same problem as I did.

It looked like I may just have to do the. Prating the old fashion way with the new phone.

Update on Thursday, October 9, 2014 at 6:48AM by Haris Abdul Rahman

Problem solved by manually uploading the Squarepace App from my iTunes backup onto my new iPhone. End of the World everted!

Playing Up?

Not sure what the deal was here, but since yesterday Squarespace’s visitor tracker had gone tipsy. In fact, it did not register any visitors to my site at all for the whole day. It did capture four visit this morning, but that was about it. Have everybody deserted me already?

It was very rare that Squarespace acted up like such. It had always been stable. Maybe there was an internal upgrade that upset everything …..

Or maybe it was the truth!!!