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 …..

Taking the Plunge

So, the iOS 8 had just been released to the masses this morning. The internet connection at Gombak House had been pretty sluggish, so I had to do the updating from the apartment. Luckily, this being a Thursday, I had some me time.

After I got my patients sorted out, had my breakfast, it was time to take the plunge. Off to the apartment.

The file size for the download was 1.1Gb for the iPhone and 1.3Gb for the iPad. On top of that, you would need around 6Gb of free space n the device for the upgrade. That meant that I had to delete some apps, as well as some unused files, podcasts and audiobooks. Easily done.

The download took less than 10 minutes, but the local parsing of the files on the device took around 20 minutes. Then the download was verified and you were asked if you wanted to update the device then. Of course the answer was yes. Another 15 minutes and I was greeted with the opening screen of the new OS.

Any noticeable difference? Not really. Everything looked very similar to the iOS7. I was bracing myself for some crashes, but hopefully new patches would be provided by the app developers to cope with the new upgrade ….