New face for Ashton Land

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Our web hosting contract with our current provider is up and we've decided to move to a different service. The move will both save money and provide greater perks. I'm excited. I haven't done anything to our website in ages, and I'm totally caught up with the notion of redesigning it.

I'm particularly thrilled to have discovered Shozam software. Easily 99% of our website is photographs (the other 1% being links to this blog and to some short videos hosted on YouTube). I have wanted a Facebook-esque photo album for our site for years. Steve said he'd create one for me, but he never found the time to do so. Most of the digital album programs out there allow only for the photos and maybe a short tag. I wanted an album that allowed me to write long descriptions of the photos. Happily, Shozam gives me everything I wanted and then some. I've been spending a lot of time (too much, probably) converting all the photos currently on the website into albums. I'm hoping to have them all done within the next few days, so I have time to add new pictures for the relaunch of the site. It's a lot of work, but I'm loving every minute of it.

The hosting service we chose has a lot of perks, including a Premium Web Builder and WordPress. The web builder supposedly will help me make fancier web pages without the need for a lot of coding. Up until now, I've been a purist. I design our site myself and write the code on Notepad. That all stemmed from someone once telling me that since I was a "feeler" type of person, as opposed to a "thinker," I could never write computer code. I set out to prove the jackass wrong. Having successfully done that, I think I may take advantage of the Web Builder this time around.

WordPress creates another conundrum. WordPress is a blog program. I tried using it on this site years ago, but it wouldn't play nicely with our hosting service. That's how I ended up here on Blogger. I really prefer having my blog on my site, so I'm very tempted to use the WordPress. The issue is what to do with the three years of archived blogs stored here? I have found no way to download the files. I may have to just use cut-and-paste and create them in WordPress. Of course, the other issue is that by being on Blogger, I'm connected to my friends' blogs more easily. So I haven't yet decided what I'm going to do.

My goal is to have the new site launched by November 1. Which is also the deadline for UH admissions. I found out that the graduate committee won't make a decision for Spring until after the application deadline. Quite annoying that. Anyway, when the site is ready to go, I will make an announcement via email and/or Facebook. We're talking about changing the domain name for it, too. So it will be all new. I'm so excited!

Which I guess makes me a huge nerd. :-)

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