Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

Every day for the last three weeks, I thought getting the new blog up was imminent. Needless to say, it isn’t up yet.

It has been a real learning experience, interesting, but very frustrating. I’ve solved a hundred little problems along the way, and I’m still not quite there yet.

My last checks with Firefox and verifying that the web pages are valid have shown inconsistencies and bugs in both Internet Explorer and Firefox’s handling of CSS that I’ve needed to fix. Then when using the zoom features of both browsers, I saw horrible results that required changing all fixed pixel sizes to relative sizes in the CSS and for all graphics as well.

Finally, when uploading it all to my website, I discovered differences between my host’s Windows server and the one I run, thus requiring debugging and research to find out why and how to fix.

In a nutshell, there are several reasons for all my troubles: (1) I’m trying to customize my Wordpress/bbPress installation to my liking. I’ve done that, but it complicates matters. (2) I’m running on a Windows server, and it’s not what most people use for Wordpress, so certain non-obvious things need to be changed. (3) I’m trying to get the webpages to look good and be error-free in both Firefox and Internet Explorer - not an easy task!

I’ve debated with myself several times in the last few months, whether to continue and finish this implementation of the new site and blog and forum and mailinglist. Or whether I should just go back to the old site and continue on with Behold. But I still believe this short term pain is worth the long term gain of a site that will be better equipped for future growth.

So let me hereby apologise to everyone currently using Behold for this delay. I haven’t touched Behold in over 3 months since I started all this. Let me do what’s required to finish it off correctly, the way it needs to be. Once that’s done, I’ll be able to concentrate 100% on Behold and getting it first to Version 1.0, and then 2.0 and Editing.

I’ve finally got through all the technical glitches so now WordPress and bbPress will work together very nicely. Now its just a matter of polishing up the various pages and putting them up.

I’m first going to concentrate on getting my new beholdgenealogy site up, and I’ll convert the old site bit by bit. The first part will be this blog. What will happen is I will activate the new blog, deactivate the old one, and change all links to the blog to point to the new site. All my Behold pages should still continue to function during all this, except for the few seconds while I’m actually making the changes.

I’ll also be copying all my old Blog posts into the new blog. The Behold User Forum had an area for Blog Comments. I’m going to attach those comments to their corresponding posts in the new blog. I’ll have a new RSS feed for the new Blog, but I’ll try to see if I can redirect the old one to it so that the old feed will continue to work.

I came up with a new registration system that I’m really happy with. When you register, you go to a page that simply asks for your e-mail address. You enter it and click the register button. It then sends you an e-mail with a link that you click on to verify you are the e-mail address holder. That link takes you to the registration page where you can select your UserID and password and enter any profile info you want. You then are registered. So what I’ve done is move the e-mail confirmation to the first step. That eliminates webbots from filling in registration forms and getting junk entered into the user database. That will get rid of a big maintenance headache that I currently have due to those webbots.

So the benefits of the blog change to you and me are:

1. More interaction: You can add your comments directly onto my posts instead of into the Forum.
2. More visibility: As a WordPress blog, it will be better indexed on Google and elsewhere.
3. Plays better with others: Feed will be RSS 2.0 (now it’s only 0.92) and it will accept Trackbacks and Pingbacks.
4. Saves me hassle: I will no longer have to manually create my RSS feed or ping services to tell them about new posts.
5. Brings me up to the state-of-the-art.

Hopefully my next post will be to the new Behold Blog.

Slower than I hoped, but I am working through the WordPress/bbPress integration. This is very important to me, since I’ll be melding the Behold Blog and the Behold User Forum together into what I hope will attract a “community” of Behold users and others who are interested in Behold. I’m trying to make it a nice and inviting environment in which everyone can discuss Behold and help me decide how best to progress into the future.

My main struggle over the last week was how WordPress handles registration, logins, user profiles and lost passwords. I was not pleased to see how unfriendly it was. So first I customized the forms to make them look like my new website. Then I added a login bar across the top of the Blog and Forum to encourage anyone interested to register. Then I changed the user fields so that there are only these: your UserID, your name, your e-mail address, your password, and two optional ones: your location and your website. Then I made it so that you can select your own password when you register, rather than WordPress’ horrid idea of sending you one it creates. And of course, there will be single login for both the Blog and Forum. I had to learn a lot about cookies to get this working together. And my PHP programming skills are improving rapidly.

The other exciting tool is I found the mailing program for my newsletter. It is actually a plugin for WordPress from ShiftThis and I’m very impressed with it. It will allow me to generate multipart HTML/text messages instead of just plain HTML like I had before. And I think I’ve solved my ISP mailing problems as well. I’ve found the ISP Dewahost who is affiliated with Plimus that has a hosted SMTP service for sending no-spam bulk-mail. The server is designed only for mass mailings, and the cost is reasonable. I expect I’ll be able to start my newsletters again soon after I get the new website up and working.

There’s still a lot of work left to get everything working, but I’m getting through it.