A funny thing happened on the way to the orchids. Some of you may know that my brother died roughly a year and a half ago. Remember all that bullshit with Nicky railing on and on for weeks about me fucking his corpse, then his ashes?
My brother used to host my orchid website for me. The servers were left running for a few weeks, but after that, poof. I maintained it myself, so I had all the files to upload elsewhere, but he had registered it for me in his name for 10 years, and there were something like three years left until it expired. After dragging my feet for a long time, I decided not to wait until the domain came up for renewal, and just bought a similar domain with hosting for it.
Since these things can take two or three days to get seeded throughout the internet, I worked on it from the back end for a little while, but it wasn’t publicly available. Then I forgot about it for a few months.
Finally, I got off my butt and pulled an all-nighter to whip it into shape, fueled by coffee and nicotine. I’d forgotten how many picture galleries there were. I’d even forgotten to FTP a few of them up to the site, and a couple of them had multiple index pages. That’s a lot of pages to edit, especially since it dawned on me that they all contained cute little house icons that pointed to the old domain name, plus I had to change all the footers.
Top that off with making sure the files for the entire domain were in a subdirectory of my primary account, dictated by my web host, and yeah, it took me all night. I ended up doing a little trial and error, then writing down where the files belong at the host, and where I pulled them off my hard drive, so I wouldn’t have to start from scratch next time I do maintenance on it.
The software I used to generate those picture galleries dates back to 2001. No way was I about to regenerate all of them, and fiddle with the settings for each to try to make them look prettier. Some I didn’t bother to upload at all, and probably won’t. I had to laugh when I saw that some had the logo.gif file on the index pages, and others didn’t. That logo has the old domain name. I can fix that graphic later. At least the footers have the correct domain name.
Anyway, the pages and galleries are up, all the links work, and so does the blog I decided to add for the first time. God do those old galleries look quaint!
I’ll add more galleries when I get around to creating them. I certainly have enough pictures to do several more, but am reluctant to keep using an eight year old copy of Arles. There’s got to be something a whole lot more customizable, and not so archaic looking. I’ll find something I like.
So . . . if anyone’s curious enough to go take a poke around, here’s the home page. Navigation’s pretty easy once you get there.
Oooh, fancy!
I shall have to nose about and see if I can learn anything.
The albums look much better now. I found a decent photo/slide show generator that I could run locally, and not have to upload the resulting albums to any album host. At least this way they can go in the subdirectories where I want them, so I don’t start breaking links.
So, I completely redid all the older albums that looked like shit, and uploaded a few new ones. My poor FTP client was huffing and puffing.
I may only have another half dozen albums to generate and upload. None of them are orchid related, so there’s no rush. If all I have to do is point, click, twiddle my thumbs, tweak a few index files, and upload it all, I’m cool.
There were some really weird-ass skins that could be downloaded for use with this software, but I don’t believe in overdoing the whiz-bang just because it can be done. I downloaded a fairly innocuous one that didn’t come with the basic package.
I need a break, and so does my FTP client. The rest can wait until I feel like working a little more on it.
I want to thank all of you who stopped by to visit the site. The page load count (excluding my own) is climbing faster than I expected, given how new the site is, and the fact that this is the only place where I’ve listed the URL.
Last night, before we went out for diner grub, I generated and uploaded a couple more galleries, which are just general garden pictures. It also seemed to make sense to break the sidebar links into categories on the home page, which I did.
It seems all my birding pictures are on Photobucket, though, which means I have them on my laptop, instead of this machine. I’m too lazy to right-click to download them all, one by one, since there are so many of them. It’d be even more tedious than installing Windows. It’s far more efficient to fire up my laptop and transfer them onto a thumb drive to get them onto this machine.
Anyway, thanks again to all of you who went to take a look.
Hi Rusty! I stopped by to look. I’m always a sucker for pretty pictures.
I wasn’t sure where else to ask, but I put a link to this blog on my WP blog, and I was wondering if you would be willing to put up a link here in return. If not it’s cool.
Also, I’m doing a serialized zombie story you might like, Zombie Punter. The first 11 chapters are up on the blog if you’re interested.
Loved the flowers, and Ive’ bookmarked the site already. ^_^
Dark places if you squint, eh? I got a chuckle out of that. Done. You’re linked, ma’am.
Many kind thanks for the link, Rusty. I shall now return to lurking and enjoying the comments of everyone else.