Category — Website

Work commitments have me snowed under right now. No time for commentary or photography but when life returns to normal soon, I will resume my writing. I have plenty to talk about: home, politics, economy etc. The Saint of the Day feature for Lent is also suspended. Instead, I will switch to Saint of the Week for the rest of the year.

This week I am reaching back into the old site’s archives and republishing many of the articles I have written over the years on the art of photography and how photography has become such an important part of my life. Many of the articles have been updated to be more current and I have also written some new articles that will be published this week too.

Hopefully, this will be the start of a more productive spell for the website.

Just saying:

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Well, I had some problems with the site over the past week. Mainly that I had none. It appeared that the utility I was using to build the photo gallery within the blog site got out of control at some point and the cache used to build the gallery started to build up. Essentially, it was creating a new cache every time rather than rewriting over the old one. Over time, this built up the number of images, each duplicated many times for each original image. This caused my file count to increase incrementally. Eventually, the filecount reached 680,000 files in 260 cache directories. At that point, my web host decided to shut me down because even though I had 20 GB of hard drive capacity for my account, I still had a limit on the maximum number of files on my server.

Apparently there was some communication problems as I was never informed on what was going on and my support tickets were never answered. So I decided to open up a new account with a different web hoster.

I did finally was able to communicate with the support people at the previous web host and know what was going on. But I had already started to move onto another webhost. They did give me a window of opportunity to fetch my files and get a backup of my blogging database which I did do.

Upon reflection, I decided it is a good opportunity to rebuild the site once more from scratch. I had many good posts on the blog but also many bad ones. Others just did not have any relevance any more or just dated. Over three years, I had over 1200 posts and several hundred comments and link backs. So what I have decided to do is go through the backup blog and bring back those articles which are somewhat timeless like my discussions on photography. I will convert some posts to static pages like the posts on when Madeleine was born.

So what will the future hold for the blog. First of all, I hope to blog a bit better if not more often. My posts will stress family, photography, culture and personal commentary. I will try to maintain a photo of the day feature. Project Runway is starting up this week and I hope to pick up the pace once again about the show. Summary posts of things going on around town and the world will be wrapped up in my Ramblings post.

I will be trying a few different looks and feels for awhile just to see how things look but I like the themes that Chris Pearson creates so I will give them all a trial.

As for everything else, it will all come together soon enough including the return of the photo galleries when I can find a stable way of doing so.