Tag: mahjong

Back in April I wrote a post called the cobbler’s shoes in which I made the poor excuse that I hadn’t redesigned my website for 11 years because I had been too busy building sites for other people.

We also had three children in that time who turned out to be somewhat time-consuming, and they didn’t simply auto-upgrade on a one-click four month roadmap like WordPress.

The plan

I concluded with the following (slightly amended) plan:

• Move to a new host.
• Standardise URLs, which will also mean that after 11 years on a sub-domain this blog will move to www.garethjmsaunders.co.uk/shed/. (See update below)
• Mobile-friendly sub-sites.
• Use a content management system or two.
• Delete a lot of content.

Of course, if you were to visit garethjmsaunders.co.uk right now you might just notice the tiny detail that erm… in the last eight months I’ve not quite managed to do any of the above.

The truth is that I delayed my plans for two reasons:

1. My web hosting with Heart Internet wasn’t going to expire until mid-January 2015, they don’t offer pro-rata refunds, and I didn’t fancy having to buy hosting twice in a year; and
2. the little matter of me getting viral meningitis in July in which I lost my sight for a couple of months. It turns out that I often relied on my eyesight for building websites.

So, this is it. Over the next month I’m planning to go through with what I’d sketched out in April.

Everything must go…

One of the things that I realise that I’ve dithered about while planning this is the “delete a lot of content” bit. I’ve got a lot of content on my site that hasn’t been updated in a long, long time (sorry). Some of it is out of date, but a lot of it isn’t but currently it’s too much for me to migrate neatly.

A lot has changed in the lasts 11 years. I no longer use a Psion (although I do still rather enjoy people emailing me about them) and I haven’t written a line of code for one for the last decade. Sadly I haven’t played mahjong much (except on the computer) in the last six years, since writing a book on it and, oh, our oldest children have just turned six—do you see a connection? And nobody really needs to read my poetry from the mid-90s, or essays I wrote at theological college, do they?

So it’s all going. Except this blog, and a few other bits and pieces. Some of it may make a reappearance at some point in the future, in a different format, but for now I need to clear the decks and give myself the space to focus on the projects I want to pursue next year, which is mostly writing. And getting well.

I just want to take this opportunity to especially thank the Psion and mahjong communities for your support over the years. I’m sorry I’m bailing out at this point but my priorities are currently different.

See you on the other side, which will now be at www.garethjmsaunders.co.uk/shed/ rather than on the ‘blog’ subdomain.

Update

Thursday 8 January 2015

After much deliberation I have eventually decided to retain my www.garethjmsaunders.co.uk subdomain. For a number of reasons:

1. I was never really happy with my blog moving to www.garethjmsaunders.co.uk/shed/. If anything I’d want www.garethjmsaunders.co.uk/blog/ but that’s not possible in WordPress multisite other than importing the blog into the root site, and I wasn’t happy with that because…
2. I want to keep the designs of my website and my blog different.
3. I realised that my website and my blog serve two very different purposes and therefore I wouldn’t necessary want to tie both to the same content management system.
4. My blog has been on the ‘blog’ subdomain since 2004, according to the WayBack Machine. If I moved the blog from that subdomain it would adversely affect search results and existing links to my blog. (I could of course use an .htaccess file to redirect traffic, but… it just seems unnecessary.)
5. I visited a couple of other sites today who had their blogs on a blog subdomain and I thought that looked cool.

And so there you have it, for now it is settled. This blog isn’t moving… except, of course, it is. Because I’m going to move it very shortly to another server.

See you on the other side…