Paul & Erik

I have an old book I am using for background content on ArchitecturalMillwork.com.  This was a book for architects and builders to use for ideas and it doesn’t have the usual chapter structure of a book.  I am new to WP so it is taking a while to figure out the best way to do things.

Today I discovered the gallery feature.  Some parts of this “book” have an introductory article followed by a few to many pages of drawings with very little text.  By using the gallery feature I can put the text from the interduction at the top of the post or page and then have all the pictures below that.

The system fails if you want to have text for each of the pictures.  Then you will have to insert each one individually.  It also looks like the database has no ability to link a photo for  use in more than one place.  Thus, if you want to use the same picture more than once you will have to upload it twice.

Fortunately, the uploads go quickly.  That may be because I have the turbo feature (Google Gears) enabled and the images are being resized on the local machine before upload.

The annual renewal fees for domain names become painful when you have enough of them.  With the rampant speculation in good domains a developer must buy names when they become available.  However, it is really easy to buy more domains, and not so easy to develop websites on them.  As a result it is easy to have several hundred domains waiting for development and earning no income.

We like to put “place holder” sites on most of the domains we are holding for development.  By this I mean we host the site and write a page or two of content about what our plans are for the eventual development.  With a link from one of our other sites the search engines find the new site and the site gets indexed.

These sites don’t have enough content to rank well, but they let the search engines know there are plans in process and provide clue as to what the content will eventually contain.  In the future, when the site gets built out this will help to avoid the “sandbox” and perhaps let the site rank better, sooner.

There is also some pruning which needs to be done.  Domains that were purchased for projects that didn’t develop, domains that look dumb in retrospect, and assorted other mistakes should be allowed to expire.

That leaves some that require more difficult decisions.  For example, we have collected quite an assortment of domains related to pictures and photos.  When first registered three years ago the idea of selling our pictures online seemed promising.  We built place holder sites, wrote some content and let them site.

Now the world is awash in digital photos.  Digital cameras are very cheap and anyone can take pictures and publish them on Flickr or some other online site.  Regular people even publish videos by the millions.  I think some talented photographers will be able to sell their photographs, but I don’t see much potential for the gifted amateur photographer.

On the other hand, I hate to let domains that have been established for three years and may even have a little page rank expire.  I figure renewal and a years hosting for a tiny site is about $8.00 so it doesn’t take much to make it worth holding a name for another year.

I have also had the experience of letting names drop only to realize later that was a big mistake.  So the tendency is to spend more than I should on domain renewals.

If you are updating an old site that has pages indexed in the search engines you don’t want to just move the content to a new page.  If you do, visitors will get a 404 page not found message.  You will also loose any links that may have been pointing to that page.  Neither of these is desirable.

As we make the switch to WordPress with the Thesis them this is going to be an ongoing issue.  Since we are hosted on Linux servers the answer is .htaccess.  This is a file you place in the root folder on your server that tells incoming page requests where to go.  It also tells the search engines this is a permanent change so they should update their information.

There are lots of things which can be done with htaccess commands but it is one of those old, cryptic syntaxes which can be really painful to deal with if you are not an expert.  What seem like very tiny changes can make your whole website vanish.

I did a search and found a tutorial that provided the redirect code which I could add to my existing htaccess file.  This would have been much more difficult if my programmer had not already created an htaccess file to handle some other issues.  Since there was an existing file I could add some simple lines of code to make the changes.