Octoberland is back.
Octoberland is back.
Written by craig coffman
Well, after an absence both unplanned and more lengthy than expected, I have octoberland back online. There are a few changes though. I hope they will not be too much of an inconvenience to you.
Firstly, I have moved hosts. The previous hosting company was fine, unless you need any technical assistance. Not that that is a small issue, but there it is. The offered solutions were akin to 'is there gas in the tank?' and then wait for a response. I did not have the time to pass back and forth one line obvious suggestions. Further, their notification system informing me my account was about to expire went to, well, not a false email but not the account I had with them. Instead it went to a two year old address. Granted, it was one I used to have, but why it did not go to the account I was hosting through them is beyond me. Not really their fault, but it irked me.
Enter the new host. While I am very pleased with my current host, and have set up numerous clients with them, I had issues moving my site over. They offered to do it for free, but the connections managed to get completely screwed up to my database. Templates would be absent, or content would not appear. But with seemingly random intervals. Not really wanting to figure it all out, I instead opted to dump the whole thing. Fortunately I still have the database, which I might plumb for a few of the stories, I have no intention to revive the archive it contains.
The upside to all this is that it finally forced me to move to Joomla 1.5, which I think is wonderful. Despite the massive screw-up caused to every single Joomla 1.5 site a few weeks ago stemming from a server update to, I believe, PHP, I have never been so thrilled with a CMS. And a free one at that!
Not only is the newer version more forward thinking and customizable, it seems to run faster than before. Plus, the control you can now style the display of any component, module, or plugin despite how the coder initially wrote it. This means you can change table layouts to pure css without worrying about re-writing the entire code base. Sure, you will need to know CSS to code this (it is not a push-button solution), but the ability to do it is the key.
Despite the headaches and the loss of content, I am much happier with the present state of octoberland. I appreciate your staying with me through the transition and I hope you enjoy the things to come.