04/08: New Look For The Cayman Host Blog

After three days in the trenches I've finally managed to get the new design up and running. Things are still not finished but at least I have  a functioning blog again. The work has left me with a backlog of things I meant to do, but it wasn't all the fault of rewriting these pages......

Somehow on Wednesday I managed to pick up a nasty little virus/malware problem and I have no idea how it got through my defences. Nevertheless it did, disabling various functions within Windows and preventing me from accessing the Registry. After cursing the people who find it entertaining to spread this kind of crap, I hunted down the solution, so although no real damage was done I still had to waste a lot of time diagnosing what had gone wrong, finding the cure and then implementing it. I hate trawling through Microsoft's pages when looking for technical answers about their OS, and usually rely on AskLeo! the excellent site of Leo Notenboom. Well worth a bookmark if you don't have it already.

This is not a Wordpress blog and when I decided that a new look was well overdue, I knew I was letting myself in for a bit of work. Nucleus is a great platform for blogging as I'm always saying, but it is developed and supported by a very small band of people in comparison with the great WP. This means that development is slower, there are less choices available in terms of ready made skins and plugins and Widgets a la Wordpress don't exist. However, with my limited knowledge of all things CSS and the like, I have always been reasonably confident working with Nucleus. Changing to a new skin, whilst likely to entail more work than the same process with WP, wasn't something that worried me too much. I figured a morning and an afternoon at most. 

Well, it took a bit longer than that. The new skin I decided to use needed a lot more changes than I thought it would and when I thought I'd done enough and uploaded the new theme, it soon became apparent that all was not well. The whole linking structure of the site had taken a vacation who knew where, the archives and categories were shot, and it seemed nothing linked to anything and all my Fancy URL's had reverted to their basic bare bones look. I was horrified, thinking it would take me days to figure it out. I left a message on the forums and finally went to sleep at around 3am. This morning the ever helpful Frank Truscott, who designed the skin I was using prior to this one, got me pointed in the right direction and the worst of the glitches should be gone. Frank certainly takes the credit, not me!

I appreciate that there is still much to be done, a few things still don't look good and navigation needs some improvement, but, I'm working on it. For some reason the formatting of my posts  did not sit well with the new skin, so some of the older ones might look a bit untidy but I'm fixing them as I write this. It just might take a while.......

I hope that visitors and readers will enjoy the new look of the site, if you do encounter any horrendous problems, please drop me a line or leave a comment. Now I can hopefully get back to writing and I have a lot of reading to catch up on too, so I'm off to Bloglines.

(In case anyone is wondering, the header image is a HDR photo of a place called Rum Point near Cayman Kai here on Grand Cayman. It's a very popular tourist spot and with good reason - a few bars, crystal clear safe waters and every incentive to do nothing).  

TCH

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