Recently in Club Josh Category

It doesn't look good! I do not think I am going to get the new site up and running before my trip. The more I mess with the site, the more it breaks and looks terrible. I am disappointed that my grand scheme of completely refreshing Club Josh is taking forever and is frustrating me to no end. For now, I think I might just have to delete everything I have on the new server and start over with porting over just what I have now.

The biggest shock is that the Gallery program I have been using seems to be the long pole in the tent. As you may know this program powers my photo galleries on the Gorn Page, my Disney Park galleries, as well as the Charo galleries on Charo.info. I shudder at the idea that I would have to re-build these galleries from scratch. The Gorn Page gallery will be the most work as there are over 800 photos and I want to attempt to keep as much traffic as I can. The Disney Galleries can go away if need be, and the Charo ones will be pretty easy to do, although I am not sure of what Charo.info will look like in 2012.

In the meantime, there is a trip coming up next week! So Gorn photos will show up post trip in their normal place, and the diaries will show up on the main Daily Update page and then the mobile site.

Perhaps 2012 will be the year I get it all fixed!!

After making good progress, I'm frustrated with how my migration is going. Now I remember why my site loses chunks whenever there is a server issue. Over time, various programs and software that I've been using have been upgraded, and as I migrate and attempt to recreate some sections of the site, things keep breaking left and right.

So far the Daily Update, What's New, and Trip Diaries have been converted to Wordpress, but I am not happy with any of the templates I have attempted to implement. Of course, I really need to design and create my own custom templates, but I have neither the time or patience to get that accomplished. The data was the hard part, so I can always launch a new site and tweak the design after it how live.

The Gorn Page represents the biggest challenge as I am attempting to go from version 1.5 to 3 of Gallery. I attempted to try to convert the site to Wordpress, but I seem to be limited with the amount of photos I can input. The site is currently close to 200MB by itself so I am sticking with Gallery and will just reuse the old customization. I've attempted twice to get the 1.5 version to work on the new server with no success. At least I am relearning how to get into a unix server in a shell environment. I'm sure 1998 Josh could get this site up faster that 2011 Josh!

So taking a break for now, I have a little over a week before my next trip, and i am cutting it close to try and get the new site up before I leave. Since I will be on a working vacation, it might be just what I need to get the site relaunched!

I've made good progress on the all new Club Josh! The infrastructure is in place, and now I am just converting all the Trip Diaries into Wordpress. It's slow tedious work, but I'm 1/3 of the way there. After that, it's figuring out what to do with the Gorn Page. The worst case is that I need to update to a new version of Gallery and then move the site as-is. The Gorn Page is one of the few sections I want to set up redirects to the new folders if it's converted to Wordpress.

After all my content is done, I just have to tweak the templates and I will throw the switch. I really, really want to get the new site up by the time of my next trip in December. I have a good chance and hopefully all your patience will be rewarded!