On Web Design

I’m doing a little blog consolidation work at the moment. Maybe I mentioned in the last post that when I started blogging, I went to town registering domains and starting random blogs.

That’s a rookie mistake that I don’t intend to make again. For a start, maintaining all those separate WordPress installs at once, is a lot of work. Even with a dormant WP site, I still feel compelled to apply security updates in case there’s a chance the site gets hacked.

Plus, I can’t stand owning so many ghost town blogs. So, I’m working on a masterplan to consolidate all those blogs and domains into a manageable block of 3-4. For example, I’ve migrated all the posts from an old tech blog of mine to this one, and then finally redirected the domain so that all the traffic comes to this site.

I've been weighing up two blogging/CMS platforms recently with a view to launching a new community site. Those platforms are Drupal and WordPress MU.

Drupal is a leading open source content management system. With the aid of some nifty add-on modules, Drupal is capable of becoming just about anything your imagination wants. Blogs, wikis, forums, event calendars and much more.

I’m throwing in the towel with Dreamhost. The downtime problems that started in the summer and seem to be intermittently reappearing have caused me to completely lose hope in DreamHost.

I signed up for a Media Temple Grid Server (affiliate link) account a few weeks back and have been gradually porting my blogs across one-by-one. With other people following suit, I thought I’d share my notes for moving a WordPress install over to Media Temple.

Any SEO worth his (or her) salt, knows that Google Sitemaps are a great way to tell Google about the pages that are available on your site. Using a sitemap, you can basically pass Google an inventory of your content and let wee Googlebot crawl your pages without having to rely on your shaky navigational system!

I’ve been working on a couple of projects recently where I’ve had to retain legacy databases and integrate them into new websites.

In order to do this without damaging the original tables, I find it useful to make a copy of the original database table and use that for the development work. Since I do all of my bespoke CMS development on hosted Microsoft SQL Server databases, I had to hunt down a quick method to copy an existing database table into a new one.

Because I develop sites using both ASP.NET and PHP, I’m tied to a Windows setup for the foreseeable future. However, I’ve been doing more and more work recently with LAMP-type applications which normally require a working Linux server installation.

Although I currently dual-boot with Kubuntu (because KDE’s pretty), I don’t have the Linux know-how to set up and run Apache/MySQL/PHP. XAMPP is a fantastic alternative, because it runs a fully configured LAMP setup on a Windows machine.

In deciding between various Linux distributions, a friend recently recommended that I look at CentOS. I duly tested it out for a bit on an old machine then decided to have a play on one of my regular PCs, setting it up to dual-boot with Windows XP.

Things were going fine until I needed to access my Windows XP partitions which were formatted with NTFS. Apparently due to concerns over licensing and the legally of tapping into the NTFS format, the CentOS developers (or more likely Red Hat) have decided not to build NTFS support in by default.

As with everything Linux, there is a way to work around this. And here it is.

Well, take a look around. I finally bit the bullet and redesigned my blog. I've tried to keep a clean design, and so navigation is kept to a minimum.

The Header

The site leads with a large graphic of an army of robots disappearing into the distance. Why? Well, my identity on a lot of social media sites is GerryBot, so I thought a visual reference to that would be appropriate. I hope it's eyecatching and unique enough to make the site stand out from the pack.

When I first decided to launch a personal blog, I made it my mission not to perform any optimisation on this site.

At the time, my thinking was that I would just run entirely off the Garland theme. I got tired of that pretty quickly, just as I couldn't stand the Kubrick/K2 theme on WordPress.

I switched to the Zen theme for Drupal, but to be honest, that's not personal enough either. I'm starting to hanker after a theme for this site that gives it a personality. Or gives me a personality.

After my rant last month about the scope and limitations of a personal site, I've thought long and hard about how my website should represent me. And probably the best way to do that is to treat myself like a client.

I'm getting tired of Google.

We've had a faithful relationship for years, but it's time to jump into bed with some new search engines. Try some new positions.

Google's been getting embroiled in a bitchy scene over the last twelve months. People are complaining that their 'Don't Be Evil' mantra is a sham, and lately they've taken a hard line on paid links while at the same time allowing millions of sites to run their AdSense and AdWords products. They're rightly being accused of double-speak.