Please Excuse the Dust… Upgrade in Progress!

By Selene M. Bowlby in Web Design on July 31st, 2009

Pardon the Dust

Just a very quick note to ask you to please pardon the dust on the web site and blog – especially if you are subscribed to the feed!

The last few weeks have found me hard at work moving the site to a new web hosting company, Blue Host (which happens to be the #1 recommended web host by WordPress).

Making The Most of My Time

Having the freedom of a private server address that worked separately from the live site, this served as the perfect opportunity to make several upgrades to the site itself – both in terms of the WordPress theme, as well as some of the content.

Nameserver Changes Can Be Quick… Who Knew?

I know that my traffic tends to be the lowest over the weekend, so I took the opportunity to initiate the DNS / Nameserver change late Friday afternoon, thinking it would take the typical 24-72 hours for propagation. Who knew that the nameservers would transfer in less than three hours, though, and cause havoc with Feedburner!

Fine-Tuning In Progress

If you’re subscribed, either via Email or RSS, you’ll no doubt be seeing what appears to be a ton of new posts (either old blog posts, or new portfolio pieces and client testimonials). I’m still working out the logistics of excluding a few categories from the feed, and didn’t expect that previously published posts would resurface as new again.

Needless to say, I’ll be spending some quality time with my site over the weekend. I hope to have everything straightened out by Monday!

Thanks for bearing with me.

Sincerely,
The Management

About the Author

Selene M. Bowlby is a web designer and front-end web developer with over twelve years of professional experience in the design industry. As the owner of iDesign Studios she specializes in creating custom web sites for other businesses. more »

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http://www.brianyerkes.com Brian Yerkes

Good Luck with it Selene! I just noticed all of the twitter posts that got shot out from your feed!
http://www.twitter.com/blogdesigner Mike Smith

Design change too? or just content & items like that? And yeah, nameservers are weird. Sometimes they go in 20 minutes, sometimes it’s 2 days. good luck with getting everything in order
http://wpmututorials.com Andrea_R

Well, I enjoyed seeing all the posts, because I hadn’t read them before.
http://www.andrewkelsall.com/ Andrew Kelsall

Hi Selene, good to know things are well with you. Just a question, would you say Blue Host provide better loading times for WP users? I’m on (mt) at the ‘mo, but it;s good to keep my options open
http://www.idesignstudios.com/blog/ Selene M. Bowlby

@Brian – Thank you! It was kind of funny, actually… I had several comments from people about the portfolio pieces – I had to go back and see what was posted through Twitterfeed, as I had no idea those all went out!

@Mike – Very minor design changes – things like widening the content area and increasing the font size, for example. I’ll soon be tweaking the comments area, as well.

The biggest change (and likely a detailed post to follow) is that I combined the site and blog to 1 installation of WordPress. I had started the blog before converting the main site to WordPress. At the time I thought it was too much work to try to combine the separate WordPress installations into one, especially on a live site, and while risking a broken link nightmare.

Since I was switching hosting companies this time, though, it was the perfect opportunity to merge both parts of the site into one. It didn’t come without it’s hiccups (that I’m still working on, LOL) but the timing worked out well.

@Andrea_R – LOL, well that is good! It’s odd how random the posts are that came out too – I hope they were good ones. I noticed another portfolio piece from months ago pop up in my feed this morning, so I’ve obviously still got a bit of work to do.

@Andrew – I’m not sure on the loading times – it seems about the same as my last host, which was Rapidsite / Verio. I have a client on MT, and it seems about the same there, too. The main reason for my move is that Rapidsite was on much older servers using old versions of PHP that prevented me from using some of the newer plugins that I’ve had my eye on.

I’ve had an account with Blue Host for quite some time now as a testing ground – I figured it was as good a time as any to make it official. It’s much more inexpensive and they give you a lot more disk space, which is great. Although they say you get what you pay for so I do hope I made the right move. I’m very happy with their 24/7 chat support, though – while Rapidsite has 24/7 support, it’s only via phone or email, and the email option has gotten much slower over the years (from responses within a couple hours to a wait as long as a couple days).

So far, so good over on Blue Host, though. It’s just a matter of me working out the kinks.
http://sexybookmarks.net Josh

Hi there, just wanted to let you know that I normally can’t stand pink on black but your site seems to pull it off quite nicely!

Very well done!
http://www.idesignstudios.com/selene-m-bowlby/ Selene M. Bowlby

@Josh – Thank you for the great compliment! BTW, I love your Sexy Bookmarks Plugin – it’s by far the best designed social bookmarking plugin that I’ve seen.
http://www.Almost-everything.c.com Karen Nierlich

How it going with Blue Host?

We’ve been with West Host forever but since they were sold last year we’ve been experiencing lots of issues. We’ve moved some clients to Blue Host and a few to Host Gator. No comments yet, except we discovered the least expensive level of hosting at Blue Host has no support.