Category — K9JY Site Updates

As a fallout from my move of hosting companies, I changed the folder where K9JY is stored on the server. But, I didn’t change Feedburner’s location, the vendor that manages my subscriptions to the blog. So the subscription attempt failed as computers are quite literal…

All is fixed now, thanks to a gracious note from Rebecca who was trying to subscribe but couldn’t and let me know.

Also, everything in K9JY-land was great if you were using Firefox as your browser — but was totally broken if you were viewing the site in Internet Explorer. The cause: a plugin I activated after doing my upgrade that I didn’t check out in the four browsers I check when doing nice stuff like that. It shouldn’t have an effect as it was a statistics program.

But, we all know what happens when we assume, right?

Now, back to our regularly scheduled contest…

Scot, K9JY

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This weekend was one long adulation to Harry Potter. It is amazing how one character can take over a family — and a fictional character at that.

This weekend saw the movie, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, burst forth in the movie theater. Another 3-4 hours gone from the precious weekend paying for tickets and popcorn at full price just for being able to see the wizard in action.

So entranced was my wife and stepson over the movie that three hours later, the new book is purchased at the grocery store instead of waiting for the free shipping time from Amazon simply because the store manager was smart enough to buy some copies and put them out by the checkout hoping to snare a few impulse purchases. He snared more than us, based upon what I heard.

Then for the rest of the night, my wife is buried in the book, laughing at different times, sighing at times, and keeping us all in suspense by not telling us a thing.

As I type this, I am waiting for a ferry to take all of us to the other side of Puget Sound. My stepson is playing in the back seat, my wife is continuing to read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, and I’ve resorted to taking out my work computer to compose this post because there is nothing else for me to do.

That Potter has ruined my marriage.

It was the best Harry Potter movie — by far — of the series.

And I can’t wait to read the book.

Scot

As many of you know, I moved my hosting site. In doing so, I lost my blogroll of other ham radio blogs and listings of clubs.

Much of that is now restored. You can check it out in  the K9JY Blogroll. There are some really good clubs and ham radio blogs there.

If you know of more, let me know and I can add them in as well.

Scot, K9JY

Subscribers here will have noticed lots of articles in their subscription feed. This is the result of moving K9JY from Yahoo! hosting to Bluehost. The reasons for the change are many; suffice to say it was time to move on.

The disadvantage of this move is the loss of the WriteLog User site; this is being worked as we speak. It was time the site was updated anyway.

Patience — I’m tired of writing about site updates instead of contesting and WriteLog!

Scot, K9JY

For those of us in the United States, today is Memorial Day. We have much to honor on this day — and much to repair.

Scot, K9JY

For a long time, I’ve wanted to move the K9JY WriteLog site to a different software platform. Since it’s inception, I’ve used FrontPage to build the site.

The main reason I selected FrontPage originally was that I did not want to learn HTML code and FrontPage was one of the few programs out there that allowed me to build stuff out using what are now called widgets.

The problem with Front Page is that every time I update pages on WriteLog, I almost have to relearn the program all over again. The big things are not hard — but there are a lot of subtle things in a web page and subtle things, like timing in a DX pileup, take time to learn. Time I really don’t have.

Blogging software, as you see here, have widgets and modules. They are relatively easy to update. And, you can change the template that contains the content all you want (something I am prone to do…) without impacting the content.

Since I maintain three blogs, I have a lot more experience that is consistently applied using the software that maintains this site.

So I’m planning to move the WriteLog site over to blog software. It will still look like the WriteLog site does now (this template has three columns with the narrow ones on the right; I want three columns but narrow-wide-narrow as the format).

But there is a lot of arranging, making sure all the links work, and all of that kind of stuff before flipping the switch.

I’ll be starting that move on the weekend. Essentially, I’ll do all of the moving, validation, and testing, then move the site on one night through changing the pointers. And announce it on the WriteLog reflector.

A lot of work. But, the payoff is easier maintenance — and updates that are done a lot more often because doing the updates is a lot easier for me. That should make it better for the readers of the site; that’s the whole idea behind the site anyway.

That’s the plan. Now, build out the steps and go on to implementation…

Scot, K9JY