Joe and Jamie’s Blog

Over the weekend I got together with Andrew to make the baby pool spreadsheet. You know that traditional thing where everyone bets on the date and time of birth, weight and length of the baby. Once it was done I really wanted to make it a website for people to just come and enter in the spots they wanted and their guesses, especially since some family is far away and it would be hard to keep faxing/mailing them an update piece of paper.

I buckled down this weekend and most of the night tonight and started coding the pool. It was really tough in the beginning for me because I don’t know any how to write to MySQL databases using CGI or PHP, I really only know ASP which I can’t use since I’m on a Linux server. Sorry for all the techno-jargon, it’s almost over. So I spent many hours learning and testing writing with PHP and MySQL to get this thing to work. I eventually got it to work and then of course figured out easier ways to code it, after it was all done. Let’s just say I took the brute force method in the beginning instead of being logical and doing loops. I guess my programming classes did me well after all to notice such silly mistakes and correct them.

The point of this post? Just to let you know that I learned how to do something and the end result came out pretty great. Check out the pool here. I’m thinking over the summer I can clean up the code even more and get it working so you can click on the square you want and just enter in the information instead of using the form. This will let me create some good super bowl pools.

Way back in October I told everyone in this post that I was creating a new website for www.joeandjamie.com. Well I finally got around to doing it…somewhat. The previous post talks about getting the URL of the blog updated and changed. That was step one. Step two is the picture gallery, which I have set up and configured. I just have the grueling task of putting descriptions on the categories and the pictures, as well as updating the naming structure (maybe) of the files , uploading all of the files which takes days, AND looking at each picture, rotating the ones that need to be rotated. Doesn’t that just sound like fun? Easy, but horribly redundant and boring work. Gee I wonder why I put it off for so long…..

So the picture gallery is there for you to look at, along with the simple main page to the site with a choice to the blog or the gallery. Go to www.joeandjamie.com and choose either site to enjoy.

Not sure if the average reader would notice this, but the domain name and URL has changed of the blog. Don’t worry, all the old links will still copy over to the exact posts with the new domain.

So here’s the change:
http://www.josephhannigan.com/blog2
is now
http://www.joeandjamie.com/blog

Update your links – www.joeandjamie.com

This is something that always has bugged me since day one. I don’t know what took me so long to do this, would have been much faster if I had done it when I had three posts and a small database.

Over the next week you may experience different looks of the blog. I will be testing some new themes. Quite frankly I have grown board with this one. I did put a lot of work into making it what it is though, I remember all the long nights tweaking the page code.

Since this was a bit of a daunting task (more me worrying about screwing it up more than anything), I want to share the articles I found that were very helpful.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress -This article is hands down the most important. It is narrowed down to each specific type of move you could be doing. Whether you are changing subdirectories or servers, this is the document for you.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Changing_The_Site_URL – This article goes deeper with the database changes to be made. I found it just as easy to backup the database, edit it in a good text editor (not notepad) to update the links, then restore it.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Backing_Up_Your_Database

http://codex.wordpress.org/Restoring_Your_Database_From_Backup
The trickiest part was figuring out how not to lose the old links. I am sure most will drop from the search engines, but I do have a handful of direct links which I didn’t want to lose. I found documents on .htaccess redirect rules which did the trick. The following site from Apache has all the mod aliases you can use. The RedirectMatch worked best for me.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_alias.html

This is the code that I have in my old blog’s folder .htaccess file.

RedirectMatch 301 ^/blog2/(.*)$ http://www.joeandjamie.com/blog/$1

This keeps everything after www.joeandjamie.com/blog/ and puts it after www.joeandjamie.com/blog/ essentially pointing all old links to the new URLs, which is exactly what I wanted! I couldn’t be any happier.

Another important step was getting the image URLs updated. This wasn’t done during any other step because they are part of the content in the post. I very luckily stumbled across a wonderful plugin to take care of this for me.

http://www.velvetblues.com/web-development-blog/wordpress-plugin-update-urls/ – This plugin allows you to enter the old URL and the new one and presto-magico its done…I wish everything were that simple…

I learned a bunch of neat stuff tonight. Feel free to ask any questions and I’ll try my best to help.

I have made a decision to finally start using www.JoeandJamie.com as an actual site and not just a forwarder we tell everyone to visit to get to this blog. What I want to do is have a nice simple page come up with two choices, our photo gallery that I am developing, or this blog. Once I get that set and finish uploading all the pictures to the gallery and organizing them, then I can work more on what I want to do with the blog.

There is only one thing that bugs me about this blog, its the fact that the link is www.joeandjamie.com/blog. I don’t know what possessed me to keep that as the live one, it was only for testing, hence the “2″ part. I really want to make it so its www.joeandjamie.com/blog which matches the blogs title. I know all my hard SEO work will somewhat die off from losing links, but I’ll make sure the mod-rewrite in the .htaccess file works right to redirect it to the correct links. At this early stage I can afford to lose a few back-links, I don’t have too many.

Now that I got that out off my chest, I should talk about the photo gallery. I don’t want to give it away yet, I’ll post the specifics when it is complete. We have always wanted a place online to store and share photos so I decided to create a gallery for them all. I’m in the process of uploading thousands of pictures and organizing them all into albums and categories so the site is nice and navigable.

So stay tuned for more stuff to come, I should have something by the end of the week.

Apparently for a reason that has yet to be told to me my server was down for 8+ hours today. I have never been so frustrated before. I asked many times and never received and answer besides “hardware issue” which annoys me even more. I mean don’t they have a fail-over routine or and sort of BDR device. No reason why if it was going to be 8 hours and I complained as many times as I did that I couldn’t have been moved to another server temporarily. True more work for them, but that’s what I pay for.

I apologize to all my readers out there, this was beyond my control.

So after all this, as soon as my plan comes up for renewal say bu-bye to this host. This was the last straw.

Web-Market.us reported this morning that it made a complete sale. I have had many people in the past click checkout but not actually purchase anything. Hooray for the first sale! You can read more over at the HanniganWebCompany Blog, or click here.