Happy New Year everyone, with a little delay. I was busy in the first two weeks of this year preparing and delivering the “Leveraging Git” webinar. It turned out to be quite a success, but it also prevented me from doing my live session last Friday.
But this short break doesn’t mean I am not going to get busy with my blog and live blog again. This is what’s coming up.
You might have noticed that I had some problems with pictures on this blog. Some posts simply didn’t show any of them, and I’ve got quite some reports that they aren’t working. Unfortunately, I’ve been so busy recently that I really didn’t have time to look into it.
A few days ago, a regular visitor of this blog that goes by the name of Bjarki took time to figure out what’s going on. He posted a comment about his finding, and that’s truly amazing. Thanks, Bjarki! 😀
Apparently, when I moved my blog to a new server, for some reason, some of the pictures got referenced with the staging URL and that URL remained in my blog database. Bjarki’s hint explained to me that the fix may be simpler than I feared. I did a search and replace (using the amazing Velvet Blues Update URLs plugin for WordPress) and voila!
I hope I get time soon to do other stuff on my blog, I know you are waiting for the continuation of the control add-ins supercharged series. It’s coming, it really is.
True, there was no episode 1, not on this blog. But if Star Wars can start with episode 4, I don’t see why can’t I start with episode 2. Especially when Waldo has already written episode 1.
So yes – apparently, up until a few minutes ago – with the new theme my blog has been sporting for a while, it was impossible to search my blog. Somehow, for some reason, the theme I applied didn’t expose the search button in the header, as most modern themes do, and I didn’t notice.
But Twitter did notice.
And then Waldo fixed it:
Well, in any case, it’s there now. Not really in the most prominent place (it’s right in the footer, just scroll down) but for now, take it as is. When I have more time to work on my blog and blog about serious things, I may move this search feature around a bit.
Until then – enjoy searching my blog 😄
A couple of months ago, when I asked my friends on Facebook and Twitter if anybody knows how to move a WordPress blog to another domain, everybody said that I was crazy. You don’t do these things, they said. And yet, when they heard the reason why I was about to leave my old domain, everybody agreed.
NavigateIntoSucess.com has served me well. I moved my public WordPress website to this custom domain very early on. It has become a kind of a brand. But it is a pretty long name. You can easily mistype it. It’s difficult to remember it if you only occasionally stumble upon it. It doesn’t at all relate to me as a living person behind it. So I decided to move it all to a fresh new domain: vjeko.com.
“Perfect is the enemy of good”, a smart person said once. Another one said: “If it works, don’t mess with it.”
So, I messed with it. I was trying to make it perfect.
Over past couple of weeks, you might have experienced downtimes, or even errors such as 403 Access Forbidden or similar here on my blog. The reason is—I was trying to make it perfect, and now I see that good might have been good enough.
As a part of my blog reviving efforts, I’ve tried improving the performance. The blog was awfully slow, so I offloaded the static content to CDN and installed the W3 Total Cache plugin to help me improve my speed. Which it did. For a while.
Then it started behaving funny, and was intermittently and unpredictably throwing errors at my visitors, for which I sincerely apologize. You don’t deserve to be thrown errors at. Honestly.
So, I’ve switched the page caching off for the time being, while I try to sort it out. In the meanwhile, I ask my fellow bloggers, if you are using WordPress and W3 Total Cache, and have experienced something similar—please help.
I woke up this morning and checked my to-do list for today. Business, business, business, and some more business. And yet it seems that my to-do list never goes blank, a couple of customers or projects are always in the backlog. I don’t know why exactly, but after opening the browser I typed the address of my blog—something I didn’t do for a long time—and I was stunned.
Almost three months since my last post. The oldest post on my blog’s home page is four months old and counting. I could remember times when a post couldn’t survive four days on my home page. My blog wasn’t dormant, it seemed downright dead.
A year ago I used to run a monthly roundup of NAV blogs and give you a short gist of who said what. Then I got lazy and stopped blogging on the weekly basis, and boy what a mistake I did – because some nice new blogs appeared in the meantime. I am somewhat ashamed that I learned about this blog only recently, but there is a gem out there you shouldn’t miss: Van Vugt’s dynamiXs.
It hit me hard today when I realized how long it has been since I last wrote something here. More than a month since my last post, slightly more since anything barely useful. I’ve been trying to write a new post for a while now, and today I just found enough time and inspiration to finally do it. So, I’m back.
So, I welcome you all back to my blog, and I hope to keep it up for you. I can’t promise I’ll get back to my previous twice-per-week schedule, but I’ll do my best not to lose the enthusiasm once again. See you around!
Can you believe it? I can’t. Almost. Two years ago I started this blog as a hobby, and I myself didn’t believe it would work out. It was months before the first reader appeared, but then it kind of just happened. Blogging was fun. It was tough. It was thought provoking for myself, because as I blogged I often found myself change my mind about stuff, and adopt new ideas or abandon old ones more quickly then I normally would.
I started this year rather ambitiously: with a commitment to blog twice a week. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to find out I haven’t been quite committed to that in the past two weeks. As a matter of fact, for the time being I’ll have to take it a little bit more easy. My work schedule has stopped being my friend a while ago, and I decided I’d put my private life before this blog. I hope you don’t mind.
I won’t stop blogging, and I’d appreciate if you didn’t stop coming back from time to time to check out what’s new. It’s just that I’ll have to rollback my commitment from the beginning of this year, and fallback to my previous irregular blogging schedule. Work and private life permitting, there will be something useful here, probably twice a month, possibly more, and I’m really glad you are now tapping my shoulder saying: “don’t worry pal, I understand!”
See you around, let’s navigate together into another two years of this blog.
Blogs are a great thing. They allow people to share their own knowledge, experience, thoughts, ideas. But communities are the real thing, they allow many people do the same at once, expanding the sharing into exchanging knowledge, experience, thoughts, ideas, advice, you name it.
One of the best IT communities out there is IT Knowledge Exchange. In their own words, “IT Knowledge Exchange was created to allow IT pros to ask questions, get answers, collaborate and exchange knowledge with their peers. Whether you are looking for an answer to an IT problem that has got you stuck or feel like helping your peers by answering their questions, IT Knowledge Exchange allows you to easily find the answer you are looking for.”
No matter which technology is your favorite, you are going to find a lot of interesting stuff on that site and I am strongly encouraging you to go and check it out.
I am also very proud to announce that NavigateIntoSuccess.com is now starting a partnership with IT Knowledge Exchange and joining a long family of IT blogs featured on their website.