Tag: website maintenance

16FEB2025 – OCF Update – Nuts and Bolts

photog Current Events, OCF , ,

This is an explanation for the “Test” post today.  I’ve been struggling to eliminate delays in posts showing up on the front page of the site.  There’s a thing called caching that cuts down on the site server’s work and therefore makes the site quicker.  But if it delays updating the site then folks don’t see the new content quickly.  I’m fighting a war to get the cache purge to happen every fifteen minutes.  I may have succeeded but only time will tell.

And now I return you to your regularly scheduled test pattern.

You Should Learn to Code!

photog Current Events, OCF, photog's Corner ,

So, as I mentioned a week or two ago, there’s a retroactive change I want to make to the site involving something called search engine optimization (SEO).  It’s obscure and boring and possibly make believe but I figured I should make the change to about 5, 500 older posts.  But it requires an enormous amount of manual copying and pasting so I wanted to automate it.  But the database manipulations I want to make are not routine and I thought required one of two things.  Either I have to learn how to program in the PHP and MySQL languages or I had to use two plugins (think of them as small stand-alone programs that can be added to my site’s software).  But one of the plugins costs a bunch of money so I was too outraged to pay for it.  By a stroke of good fortune, I found a different plug-in that was almost as good but much cheaper.  Yeeha!

But with all things too good to be true comes the payoff.  I also needed to upgrade my backup system and that’s going to require upgrading my cloud storage.  Gack!  Well, I’ve spent the bulk of the day setting up a link to my new storage site from the website with all sorts of problems with various layers of security programming standing in the way.  Finally, it’s uploading the backup but it’s been a humbling experience.  And I’m also getting a lesson in why working with redundantly encrypted data is a royal pain.  It uploads at the slowest rate imaginable.  But later on, tonight I’ll try to make those SEO modifications to those thousands of old posts.  If the site disappears hopefully, it’ll just be a (short) refresh to get it back to its old self.  But fingers crossed.

It’s still early in the voting but it looks like maybe some folks would like me to increase the font size on the site from 12 pt to 14 pt.  The reason I asked about this was recently I was on a website and noticed how nice the type looked.  After checking on the text I realized it was 14 pt and wondered if maybe I was making life difficult for people to read the smaller font size.  Luckily that is a very easy fix to make.  Even I can make the CSS modification.

Well back to the website salt mines for me.  Pray that my sentence is reduced down from life at hard labor.

Signed,

photog the website drudge (not to be confused with Matt Drudge).

22DEC2022 – OCF Update – Out of Pocket

photog Current Events, OCF , , ,

Today I have to catch up on some work.  I have to read some pretty boring procedural documents for work.  Also I’m trying to figure out how to make a global change in the website database.  There’s a free “plugin” that can be used to make the change one post at a time but I need to carry it out on something like 5,800 posts.  There’s a commercial version that supposedly will carry out the change globally but I think it’s a small programming change to do it myself.  So I’m reading this book on PHP and MySQL development.  The book’s about 600 pages so I suspect this will take a while to get a handle on.  But I feel it’s a good idea to start understanding how this web development stuff works.  Underneath the HTML page structure the PHP programming controls the dynamic aspects of the web site.  the thing I want to do is a database copy and paste operation.  In my ignorant take on this it should be like copying a row of excel cells and pasting it into another row.  But the reality, I’m sure, will be much much messier.  If the website crashes and burns you’ll know I pushed the wrong button.

Other than that, I’m continuing on with my holiday routine of eating too many Christmas cookies and watching way too many old movies.  It’s a simple plan but it works for me.

I studiously avoided the Zelenskyyyyyyyyy speech before Congress.  I added the extra y’s because I have now seen his name spelled with one y and two y’s and want to get ahead of the curve.  Honestly I wonder how long we can keep up sending billions of dollars to those people.  All we’re doing is throwing gasoline on a fire.  It’s pretty scary.  If the Russians level Kiev are we going to try and invade Russia.  Even Dementia Joe can’t be that stupid.  He’ll end up on the trifecta with Napoleon and Hitler.

Well, that’s enough for now.  I’ll get something together later when the Muse strikes.