Well that was a long downtime. I guess it’s been almost 6 months now that this here blog has been just sitting there sadly neglected. Originally I was hoping it’d only be a month or two, but that got delayed by various things over and over again, and BAM…6 months had flown by. Kind of like me learning Thai or losing weight, but more digital-y. At any rate, G2D is back up with a new design, a new platform, a few new banners and a new appreciation for how much I don’t know about website design. It’s nothing radical, but it’s a nice change and it’s good to be back online. More details on platforms, bad communication and technical difficulties below, if you’re into that kind of thing.
Since about 2006 my old site was hosted on Squarespace, which for 99% of that time was superb. Like, amazingly good. Version 5 (V5) was incredibly intuitive and allowed me adjust any element I wanted, and their customers service was the best of any company I’d ever experienced, ever. If I ever had a problem, I got a response to my email within minutes, 24/7/365, usually with a solution. Anyway, long story short, for about a year they were teasing V6…the best thing ever, it’ll change web design, it’ll be amazing. Emails, Tweets, blog entries…all about how awesome V6 was going to be. Then, when it finally came out about 8 months ago, it was so bad that I thought there must have been some mistake. It removed most of the functionality of V5, offered an anemic number of templates that all looked roughly the same, and became – to my point of view – unintuitive, clunky and confusing. I could have stayed with V5, but I was so looking forward to something new and great, and it was just the opposite. It pissed me off, and I wasn’t the only one.
The old Greg to Differ site on Squarespace.
So, I decided to go back to WordPress, and that’s where I am now. I downloaded a theme I thought was okay, had a few tweaks done to it (like the banner that’s new upon every page refresh) and a few other little things from those who are much smarter than me at web design (like my buddy Gordon, the nice fellow that he is).
For hosting I chose Dreamhost because…well, because nothing really, they’re a big name in hosting, so I figured they can’t be that bad. Turns out I was wrong, and the less said about them the better. So, I turned to my friend Jodi and asked her where she hosts her very popular site LegalNomads, and she sent me to ActualWebSpace.com and the guy who runs that, Raam Dev. I was having a bit of a nightmare migrating from Dreamhost to AWS (see my previous n00b status) but long story short, Raam went in there, busted some digital heads, kicked some digital ass, and two days later I had everything (almost) how I wanted it and ready to go.
Raam vs the Internet
So there you have it. I still have some tweaking to do and I’m re-learning a lot about WordPress in the meantime, but it’s good to be back up and online again. Hope you like it.
Dreamhost keep getting their servers hacked (and therefore my websites) and they keep sending me emails that it is my fault and I should continually update all the various website softwares and, of course, since it is “my fault” then I have to fix the break and enters every time it happens. I once emailed them that is was through an Apache vulnerability (and therefore beyond my control, ie “their fault”) and the nice man helped fix my websites by going through them all and deleting changed, or infected pages – leaving me with no workign websites that I then had to go through and fix manually.
luckily I do know webstuff otherwise I would have been well and trully stuffed.
Nice to have something that interests me to read.