All I can say is PHEW! I am so happy to be back on-line again after a process that took more than five months to complete. At first, I assumed I would be up and running within a couple of weeks but, as things always go with technology, it took a lot longer. Here's a partial story and an explanation of what lies ahead. Look for new Glaucoma, Tech, EMR, EdTech and Talking About Glaucoma podcasts in the weeks ahead....but I will be working on writing my first novel in November 2012 because it is http://NaNoWriMo.org time (if you plan to write a novel this month, add me as a buddy!)

The blogging platform that I have been using since I started wholelottarob.com in early 2009 is called Squarespace. It really did things differently from Wordpress, which is still probably the most common platform in use today. There was always more flexibility in terms of being able to start with a pre-fab template but really go beyond that by customizing any element of the site you create. When my office site was revamped, I had the help of a graphic artist to tweek some of the CSS stylesheets to make it consistant with my http://westcoastglaucoma.com site and all was good in the world.

Around May 2012, Squarespace released version 6 of their Content Management System. In order to take advantage of the new system, I had to create a brand new blog by importing my version 5 into a new site. Unfortunately, as I had so many embedded items in my original blog that were now easier to just drag and drop into the new site, there were so many bugs that I had to manually edit every article on the new site. Most of this was done by opening the old site, copying the text, going to the new site, then creating a new version of the article, save it, then backdate it to the date originally published. Every line of text and every image was slowly re-entered into the new version of the site since all the articles were corrupted. Fortunately, over the years I had kept almost every single image used for every article organized fairly well in DropBox folders which made things easier. Every few days however, articles that had been deleted from the new site that were defective would re-appear, including old drafts of articles that I had never published...they just refused to die. I think also as Squarespace was updating different aspects of their CMS, such as the night they replaced the drag and drop functionality and suddenly all my images lost their re-sizing, filenames, and sub-titles! For many articles that I had imported from my old site, they were so corrupted that they could not even be opened with the new site to delete them...after trying every browser on multiple computers, I finally realized that the iPhone version of the squarespace app allows for deleting articles without having to try to open them...so this is how I was able to delete the corrupted articles.

New content should follow in the weeks and months ahead once I recover from the five month process of migrating to my new site. I hope that I didn't lose too many readers or podcast listeners along the way (I was averaging over 1,700 unique readers each month.) I also hope to gain more followers as I finally post new content so be sure to let your friends know that I am back on the air!

Technology

Wholelottarob.com - completely revised & ready to write!

WholeLottaRob

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