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 …..

Spam Attack

I woke up this morning to a flurry of emails pushed onto my tablet. They were from my blog host, Squarespace. My site had been spammed quite literally.

It was a bit more sly than usual. The actual site was still up and running, but the spammer basically inserted a code so that on some of my entries, there appeared to be some reference at the bottom. This appeared instead of comments.

This morning alone, there was close to 60 such entries. Removing them would be a pain since I had to individually delete them. The blog however stayed up as usual.

I would have to write to Squarespace to ask them to look into the matter as it was driving me mad ...

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!!!

Revival

I have three main interests and from that three sister blogs had spawned over the years. The first of the three was photography, and I had always wanted to aggregate all my photos into one site. Not for hosting - I have SmugMug for that, plus Flickr for the social side - but as a gallery.

As I was a beta tester for Squarespace, I was given a good offer to use their services. I used that opportunity to create photobyharis.com. It has a fantastic interface, but unfortunately, I never had the chance to really tweak around with it. Since I had some time off, I finally had the chance to look things through.

First out was the planning of the site, plus uploading the material. And they were tons of them. Fortunately, with the bandwidth I had at the apartment, that part was easily taken care of.

Next came the finishing touches. And this would be the one which I would struggle with. But hopefully, the site would be ready by the end of the weekend ........

As for my other two interests - tech and Haematology news - that would have to wait. A lot of work ahead then.

Travel Entry Update

Since I kept getting called from the ward - a few ill patients last night - I decided to stay up a bit longer than usual. I actually ended up updating my links on my previous overseas travel.

I only managed to work on the Atlanta trip - which turned out generating quite a few links. There were entries from applying for the visa right up to returning to Malaysia and headed straight for multiple on calls. The highlights for the trip must be my first time in the A380. Atlanta was not much of a draw unfortunately.

The Kyoto trip has yet to be patched up yet. That would probably come in later. Hopefully I could make as many updates in my trip next week to Lugano. I had bought some travel books in preparation for the trip, looking forward to leaving next Monday evening.

But for now, I had to cover one of my senior colleagues who was away on conference leave in Stockholm. Extra work for me from the looks of things, but hopefully I could have some rest after that.