dW

I Have Returned

I’ve been mortally wounded and placed within a Dragoon exoskeleton.¹ No, actually I’ve returned from having my website down for a week. The entire process has been quite a learning experience. I’ve lost my cool quite a few times during the process, but things as you can see have worked out in the end. I have quite a bit to explain, but I just want to get the website back up and running. I’ll work up good descriptions of what I went through changing hosts and save it for another post. I’ll focus more on the changes I’ve made to the site itself here as it’s taken up the majority of the time.

I had everything installed on my server prior to switching nameservers. After the switch I moved my website over and had it working properly within minutes. After I made the switch I grew a wild ass hair and decided I’d switch my site completely to HTML 5. Technically it was HTML 5 prior to my changes, but I couldn’t use any of the new elements because Gecko-based browsers (such as Firefox) contained a bug which prevented such. Switching to something more cutting edge has its disadvantages, and such is that it is quite impossible to get the website to function properly under Internet Explorer 6 and 7 the way it is now. However, thanks to a bit of JavaScript code Internet Explorer 8 can be coerced into displaying everything correctly. Chances are if a reader is using those browsers they wouldn’t understand much of what is discussed here anyway, however navigation should still be possible. I will be dropping support for Internet Explorer 6 as it is almost eight years old and should die a most horrible and gruesome death. It is possibly one of the absolute worst pieces of widely-used software in computing history.

I’ve gone through and have simplified my website’s code quite a bit, taking into consideration things that are rarely used or were never useful to begin with. I’ve reduced the amount of feeds I have down to one which contains both my article and link posts. The reasoning behind this is that I don’t make many link posts to warrant its having a separate feed. That in turn negates the need for a separate articles feed as well. Subscribers to the old links feed will be presented with a 410 error as the resource used to exist but no longer exists. The articles and master feeds will just forward to the new, solitary one. I’ve also completely removed the search feature on my website as it was never useful to begin with. If a search on my website is desired a simple Google search would do the trick nicely. I’ve made things incredibly easy for Google and other search engines to index my website.

There are a couple of existing problems, but they can be fixed later. I plan on doing some more changes as modifying my alternate stylesheet switcher as I’ve never really been truly happy with it. I’m still mulling things around in my head for its replacement.