Well, after many, many years, my website is finally getting an overhaul. Its current version has been almost completely unchanged since 2012, and it’s been overdue for a spring cleaning and update for a long time, so that’s what I’m going to do!
The first thing I’ve done has been to move this site to a new and better hosting company (ie the people who own the servers that your computer is reading this post from right now). By the time you read this, the move should have been completed. Unfortunately, this has come with a bit of a transition period where the website was half on one server and half on another, so if you commented on the old version of the site, your comment will have been lost . . . sorry! Things should be stable from now, though, and you guys should hopefully see better loading times from now on.
Since I’m going to be selling things on this website from now on, I’m also getting around to putting in some security software, which should be done by the end of today. You’ll know if it’s worked because the ‘Not Secure’ warning at the top of my website should stop displaying, which has been an irritation for a while.
Over the next week, I’ll also be redesigning the site in general. The contents of the drop-down menus will be resorted, and I’m going to get rid of a bunch of old plugins and widgets that don’t work anymore. I’m hoping to have it done by next Friday.
And yes, the new novella is still on schedule to be released by then! I’m aiming to release it on this site a week from today, on June 18th.
Website updates warm the cockles of my geeky IT heart! I’m looking forward to seeing the new & improved site!
Just fyi when you click on the new novella link in this post the link doesn’t work.
Thanks, fixed. There may be a few more errors like this while the site switches over to a higher security version.
Benedict,
One quirky thing about the site is now is that older posts no longer have an option to add a comment.
For example, updates from May 14 & earlier, don’t have a comment option. For example:
https://benedictjacka.co.uk/2021/05/14/a-not-so-short-story/
https://benedictjacka.co.uk/2021/04/30/spring-update/
But updates posted May 21 & later still let you add a comment.
That behavior is different than the old version of the web site which let you add a comment to any of your updates, Ask Luna posts, news items, etc.
That’s been the case for a while! I got sick of having to manually delete comments on my years-old posts advertising cheap drugs or whatever, so I just set posts to disallow comments after a month or so.