The Big Move, Part I
07 September 2011 00:48 Filed in: Administrivia
This is the first post-move Musing, and I’m actually writing it before the move to ensure I get down all the details I know about in advance. There will probably be a Part II once everything settles down and I know what I forgot to mention. Then I can finally get back to writing about trains, or better yet, playing with them.
So, the move has happened, or will have by the time you read this. A couple of major changes in the end: first, the site has been restructured and in some places rewritten, but it’s basically the same site as before otherwise. Second, I couldn’t get the RSS Feed URLs for the Musings or Photo Albums to remain the same, so if you use those you’ll need to delete the old ones and get the new ones. However, you might want to hold off on that, as I’m not sure as I write this that I’ve got them correct yet, and I’ll need to do some experimentation once the new site is up to ensure they’re working.
Welcome to Sumida Crossing 2.0 (and that’s the last time I’m using that name; it’s just Sumida Crossing from here on out). This is really the same website I had on iWeb/Apple Hosting as far as content goes, absent a bit of cleanup. What’s changed is the format, as I moved to use of RapidWeaver, a template-driven website creation tool not too dissimilar to iWeb when you come right down to it, but more flexible in many ways (and, unfortunately, less stable; I manage to crash the darn thing daily, although I’ve never lost or corrupted any saved data in doing so).
I had to redesign some things due to differences in the tools, and I changed other things because I hadn’t been happy with the way iWeb worked but hadn’t been able to do anything about it. A big change is that I widened the site to 1000 pixels (iWeb used less than 800) and took advantage of that on the photo album pages to eliminate the sidebar and just display thumbnails across the whole width. Another is that I restructured it to be more formally hierarchical, so the links on the left on most pages are often section headings with several to dozens of pages under them. If there’s a green triangle next to a name, that means it has sub-pages.
The other thing to mention is that as noted I’ve changed the RSS feeds. Unfortunately, at the moment, there is no RSS feed for changes to the photo albums. I want one, and I’m going to look into doing that with an external system, or perhaps some separate software, but I don’t have it at the moment.
What I do have is the standard RapidWeaver RSS feed for a blog, which appears on the Musings main page as the default (there’s also a link in the sidebar there if you prefer that method of subscribing). There’s also a separate RSS feed for non-Musing website changes, which is the default on the Home page, and both it and the Musing RSS links appear at the bottom of the sidebar on the home page (and if/when I get a photo album feed, I’ll add that to the Home sidebar, as well as putting it on the main photo album page.
The planned feeds are:
- Musings - notes the half-dozen most recent Musings entries in summarized form.
- Photo Albums - doesn’t exist yet, but when it does will note any photo album pages that have new images added to them (I hope)
- General - This is a manually-created RSS feed to note any other pages with significant changes (more below)
I want to say a couple of words about the General feed. This is for those people who are more interested in the content pages of the site than my ramblings on the Musings. However, I didn’t want to go with something that noted any minor change (in part because RW has a small problem that causes it to update lots of pages when things like the navigation bar is changed by new pages being added). Also, if I fix a typo, I expect most people to be uninterested. Doing it manually means I can make entries only when there’s something worth seeing.
So what I’m going to do is basically take the things I used to note at the end of each Musing as “other website changes” and make that an entry in the General feed. Each entry will note one page being changed, with a link to it and a few words summarizing what changed. The feed will record the ten or so most recent changes (I can increase that if ten proves insufficient). This also allows me to update pages and tell people about them out of sync with the weekly blog updates, which is useful for those weeks when a lot is going on.
You’ll see the first entry is already in that feed, noting an update to my Reservations page as the JR West 125 Series train for my “Urban Tram” layout was pushed back to “Late September” (it had been due in just plan “September”).
As noted before, I’m not sure what I’m doing for comments on the Musings pages. That’s coming, eventually, but not immediately.
So, the move has happened, or will have by the time you read this. A couple of major changes in the end: first, the site has been restructured and in some places rewritten, but it’s basically the same site as before otherwise. Second, I couldn’t get the RSS Feed URLs for the Musings or Photo Albums to remain the same, so if you use those you’ll need to delete the old ones and get the new ones. However, you might want to hold off on that, as I’m not sure as I write this that I’ve got them correct yet, and I’ll need to do some experimentation once the new site is up to ensure they’re working.
Welcome to Sumida Crossing 2.0 (and that’s the last time I’m using that name; it’s just Sumida Crossing from here on out). This is really the same website I had on iWeb/Apple Hosting as far as content goes, absent a bit of cleanup. What’s changed is the format, as I moved to use of RapidWeaver, a template-driven website creation tool not too dissimilar to iWeb when you come right down to it, but more flexible in many ways (and, unfortunately, less stable; I manage to crash the darn thing daily, although I’ve never lost or corrupted any saved data in doing so).
I had to redesign some things due to differences in the tools, and I changed other things because I hadn’t been happy with the way iWeb worked but hadn’t been able to do anything about it. A big change is that I widened the site to 1000 pixels (iWeb used less than 800) and took advantage of that on the photo album pages to eliminate the sidebar and just display thumbnails across the whole width. Another is that I restructured it to be more formally hierarchical, so the links on the left on most pages are often section headings with several to dozens of pages under them. If there’s a green triangle next to a name, that means it has sub-pages.
The other thing to mention is that as noted I’ve changed the RSS feeds. Unfortunately, at the moment, there is no RSS feed for changes to the photo albums. I want one, and I’m going to look into doing that with an external system, or perhaps some separate software, but I don’t have it at the moment.
What I do have is the standard RapidWeaver RSS feed for a blog, which appears on the Musings main page as the default (there’s also a link in the sidebar there if you prefer that method of subscribing). There’s also a separate RSS feed for non-Musing website changes, which is the default on the Home page, and both it and the Musing RSS links appear at the bottom of the sidebar on the home page (and if/when I get a photo album feed, I’ll add that to the Home sidebar, as well as putting it on the main photo album page.
The planned feeds are:
- Musings - notes the half-dozen most recent Musings entries in summarized form.
- Photo Albums - doesn’t exist yet, but when it does will note any photo album pages that have new images added to them (I hope)
- General - This is a manually-created RSS feed to note any other pages with significant changes (more below)
I want to say a couple of words about the General feed. This is for those people who are more interested in the content pages of the site than my ramblings on the Musings. However, I didn’t want to go with something that noted any minor change (in part because RW has a small problem that causes it to update lots of pages when things like the navigation bar is changed by new pages being added). Also, if I fix a typo, I expect most people to be uninterested. Doing it manually means I can make entries only when there’s something worth seeing.
So what I’m going to do is basically take the things I used to note at the end of each Musing as “other website changes” and make that an entry in the General feed. Each entry will note one page being changed, with a link to it and a few words summarizing what changed. The feed will record the ten or so most recent changes (I can increase that if ten proves insufficient). This also allows me to update pages and tell people about them out of sync with the weekly blog updates, which is useful for those weeks when a lot is going on.
You’ll see the first entry is already in that feed, noting an update to my Reservations page as the JR West 125 Series train for my “Urban Tram” layout was pushed back to “Late September” (it had been due in just plan “September”).
As noted before, I’m not sure what I’m doing for comments on the Musings pages. That’s coming, eventually, but not immediately.
