I’ve been busily working for the last couple days getting Jenn’s site all back in order. Not only did we migrate her from Blogger to WordPress (like I did), but we also redesigned the entire site adding a lot more content and a brand new look.

It’s still early and I’m sure we’ll tweak some, but everything is mostly in place.

Being totally new to WordPress, it took a while to get used to their componentized templates and heavy use of PHP for stitching it all back together. Easy work for some, but maddening for a first-timer.

I thought I’d give a shout out to some of the developer’s out there that lended their wares to the effort.

The JavaScript slideshow gallery on the front page is from Jon Design’s Smooth Gallery 2.0. It was a fairly easy incorporation and seems to be fast and quite flexible.

The other is Dagon Design’s Secure Form Mailer plug-in. I had reused the PHP scripting from my old site and got it to work, but it felt cobbled together and offered little in terms of spam protection. We’ll give this plug-in a try and hopefully Jenn’s inbox will stay clear of unwanted mail – or not more so at least. Head over to Jenn’s contact page and drop her a line…

Hey all! As some of you may know, Jenn and I have been having issues with Blogger. Everything worked fine for almost two years, then suddenly we couldn’t post images and then, over the last couple weeks, we couldn’t post anything. The posts show-up in our dashboards but they never get re-distributed back to our server and thus to you.

After some attempts at contacting customer service with a miserable lack of results (thanks, Blogger) we’ve dumped Blogger and are now serving up our own WordPress sites. Bear with us as we update stuff. I’ll be trying to maintain links to images, but the permalinks to articles may have shifted in the upgrade. Let us know how it’s working on your ends.

Cheers,

J.