New Look

Thanks to those who have commented on the new look in a positive way.

The new theme is Hybrid News, which I started playing with for yet another blog I’m building, one which should have been up and running this past Friday.  It is a local news ‘blog’ that represents  my attempt to “think local and act global”. (Or is that “think global and act local”?)

We had a major glitch over here on Friday, having outgrown our server with the paintball site (www.68caliber.com – don’t bother going there, it’s still not back up and running).  The current host’s options were not acceptable for us, so we had to find a new host and effect a transfer without having been prepared to do so.  “Seamless cutover” is not something you’ll hear said around here.

While waiting for the DNS changes to take effect (multiple websites), I decided I’d give COF the facelift.

The new theme is also running under the latest iteration of Wordpress (2.8.4), since, if something is going to go bad, it may as well go bad all the way.  I’m not a big believer in taking small steps.  Hung for a lion rather than a mouse and all that.

Hybrid News requires the install of Hybrid for some of the functionality, but that IS pretty seamless.

The new news site has a much greater degree of functionality than anything I’ve worked on before:  the front page offers video, the traditional posts, RSS feeds from external news sources (local, regional, US, world), there are resources for cable and satellite tv, internet radio, video sharing and image sharing.

And, surprise, surprise, it only took me about ten days of testing out various plugins, layouts, etc., to get everything working the way I wanted it to.

Here’s the only problem (in case you weren’t aware of it): Wordpress is apparently a server resource hog.  Even with off-site storage of videos, images, audio files, etc, it grabs a lot and is heavy on the database usage as well.

So we decided to go with a host that offers “wordpress” hosting, since they’ve done what they need to do on the server-side to optimize databases and server usage.

The upshot is: 68caliber ought to be back up and running today.  The new news site will probably be accessible tomorrow and

COF and it’s sister web site – the Classic Science Fiction Channel – will continue to get facelifts and the addition of new functionality.

I’ve still got some work to do on the categories and their drop downs and I intend to add some RSS feeds in the side bars for various blogs I visit regularly, as well as some other cosmetic stuff (I still want an image at the top of the blog…).