Tramping New Zealand | website rehab
It’s more than 10 years since I first established my hiking website, Tramping New Zealand.
I’ve added webpages over the years as I go on more Little Adventures and now have over 1500. And the photos number more than 6000.
It’s become an impressive monolith and gets around 1000 page views a day at this time of year.
But I’ve concentrated on adding content rather than updating the existing content as time has gone on.
My forced inaction has opened up a more sedentary opportunity to do a comprehensive overhaul.
I’ve had some urgent tasks over that ten years.
Adjusting for the small screen sizes of cell phones
Adding security certificates to convert from HTTP to HTTPS
A server change that required upgrading the PHP version
These were the biggest issues to deal with, but I’ve also had sporadic upgrades of the Textpattern program that runs the website. Textpattern is the administrative framework that I used to operate the website using a relatively non-technical interface.
These changes broke things both big and small.
For instance, I broke all my cell phone images when an upgraded plug-in needed work. Fortunately, the highly responsive Textpattern forum quickly solved the issues of me not being a programmer and having scant knowledge of PHP.
I’m slowly chugging my way through every page, all 1500 currently, to ensure they have accurate information and up-to-date images, etc.
The weeks go by, and slowly the list of things to finalise the upgrade rehab is being ticked off.