The decorations get really nice (scary) in our neighborhood this time of year. I took these photos this evening while walking the dogs. Click the photos to see more and visit my photo stream.

I’ve settled on the theme “Twenty Fourteen” for my site. It’s very simple, works great on all of my devices, and it has “infinite scrolling” (and it’s free). Infinite scrolling means it will display the first group of posts (I think I set it to 20), but if you get to the last post when scrolling down, it automatically loads the next 20 posts. So basically, you can keep scrolling and read every single post on my site without ever having to click a “Next Page” link. I like that. I’m lazy.

We’re doing good with our new hosting services so far. It definitely can’t be beat for the price. And all of my subscription options and hosting settings are embedded right into the WordPress administration menus, so I don’t need to go to multiple different websites like I did before. I wish I had made this change years ago.

I configured the main menu to be pretty much the same as what I’ve had for years, but with a few additional links to my social media accounts. Yes, I know “Twitter” is “X” now, but I refuse to comply. I’m sorry, but X has, and will always be, to ME at least, the universal symbol for “Close” or “Close Window”. I refuse to call Twitter “X”. It just sounds wrong, like it’s a port site, or something banned or crossed-out. Even in the Twitter app, which has an “X” in the middle, I’ve instinctively tried to close it once or twice by stupidly pressing that logo. Yeah, I’m an IT geek, I’m just getting old. But I’m never going to add a menu item to my website with just an X in it.

Enjoy the site, and I welcome your feedback. Even if it’s just on whether or not you can add comments or not… I opened it up a bit to not require a login, but that got really messy the last time I tried it, with hundreds and hundreds of bots and worldwide spammers posting garbage everywhere. I’m curious if that was just a side-effect of my hosting provider though, so I’m giving it another shot to see how it goes.

This is my first post on WordPress.com. I have moved my website from my previous host, Powweb.com. I had been with Powweb for many years and up until now I haven’t had many issues at all. But their hosting price, for my very simple, small website, recently tripled in price, and with no warning I was charged for another year at triple the price, with no prior notification. I was pretty shocked when I saw the charge, and immediately contacted them.

Discounts were offered and refused, and it took a few attempts, but I finally got the charge reversed and my site cancelled with them. I was able to make a quick export of my website, so I didn’t lose any of my old posts, fortunately. So here it is. Some of the links and functionality might be broken, but I’ll fix every issue I find. And as usual, I’ll try to post as often as I can.

Over 813 posts since January of 2001. That’s over 23 years of history. I only wish it included all of my Facebook posts as well. But, as I’ve always figured, Facebook will eventually go away, like everything else has, but I’ve tried to keep my own website intact through the evolution of the internet and its vast changes. Maybe this site will even outlast me. That should be easily accomplished, since I’ve already paid for the domain itself five years in advance, and I just got an additional year tacked onto it just for moving to WordPress. As long as someone can swing the $48/year ($4.00 per month), this thing will sit here, waiting for another year’s tens of users to stop by and read my ramblings.

Enjoy!

I’m removing the Runkeeper plugin from my site.  Or at least deactivating it for the time being.  It’s working fine, but unless it adds the photos that I take on my walks, or if I can find another plugin that does that, I won’t be re-activating it again.  It just seems like site-spam, and it pushes all of my actual posts down and off the front page too quickly.  So there goes that.  I’ll keep it sending to my Facebook feed though, it gets buried in there pretty quickly anyway, along with everyone else’s posts.

The photo migration continues… it looks like it’s doing about 5,000-6,000 per day, so maybe in a couple weeks it’ll be done. Unless there really is over 90,000 photos and videos in there (and Flickr can’t count right).  Take a look: https://jimsphotoworld.smugmug.com/.

The migration of my photos and videos from Flickr to SmugMug is still in progress, and probably will be for several more days.  It’s currently at over 13,000 photos and videos and increasing every minute.  I’m still not sure of how many photos and videos I actually have on Flickr though.  It’s either over 90,000 or just over 48,000, but that’s quite the difference.  I guess I’ll know once the migration completes and I check to see if everything is there as far as I can tell.

Meanwhile, I continue to battle repeated attacks on my website.  I have cleaned it up recently, got rid of all of the old obsolete no-longer-supported plugins that I had on it, and installed some decent protection that will hopefully keep our the riff raff.  So far it’s been a bit of a struggle.  I’ve found that I had several infected files on my site as well as several additional files that contained malware which were uploaded by the attacker(s) and just sitting on my site.  I also had over 3,000 bogus user accounts that had accumulated over the years–one or two of which were even Administrator accounts!  Wow, the vulnerabilities!  BAD webmaster, Jim, BAD boy!  So please accept my apologies if you happened to get redirected to a site that might have said you PC was infected, displayed pornography, or did some other bad attempt at phishing.  I really had no idea it was so bad.  It’s all better now though, and I’m trying to check it daily to make sure it stays that way.