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Simon Yeo

I’ve shut down my Weblinks Website

Dec 9, 2018 | online publishing | 0 comments

I’ve shut down my Weblinks Website

Early web publishing and bookmark sharing

One of the first websites I ever made was a simple Blogger (Google’s blogging platform) site to record some of my favourite websites.  This was a long time ago, before social media and before you could synchronise browser bookmarks across devices.  I put a lot of thought into the name of that site, and called it “Simon’s WebLinks”.  If I found a website I thought I might want to share with someone else, or access from another computer, I would write a short post including a screenshot and hyperlink.

Once I found out how cheap and easy it was to register a domain name, I even set up Simon’s WebLinks with a custom URL – www.simonsweblinks.com

Moving to WordPress and a new domain

Fast forward a couple of years and I had discovered WordPress around the same time that new Top Level Domains became available.

(A new Top Level Domain is a web address that doesn’t end in the tradition dot-com or dot-net, such as dot-website). 

I registered the domain name weblinks.website and created my brand new WordPress website.  At the same time, I also imported the old Blogger site into a seperate WordPress site and archived it at simons.weblinks.website

WebLinks Website

The first ever post on Weblinks Website (can still be seen on the WayBack Machine)

We don’t need a WebLinks site in 2018

These days a lot of people don’t browse the web, they browse social media.  If you do have favourite websites, broswer bookmarks can be synced across devices.  There is just no need for a WebLinks Website anymore.

When the weblinks.website domain renewal came up, I had to make a decision whether or not to keep the name for another year.  Looking back over the site, I was suprised at how many of the great websites I frequented years ago no longer existed.  The site now had more bad links than good.  It was time to let my Weblinks Website die.

Now what?

Even though weblinks.website has gone, much of the site can still be seen on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.  If I do come across any amazing websites worth sharing in the future, you can bet I will write about them here on my personal blog.

NASA Astronomy Picture Of the Day

NASA Astronomy Picture Of the Day – apod.nasa.gov/apod

Vancouver webcam

Vancouver webcam – www.katkam.ca

     You might also like this related post – I’ve shut down my photo site (Nov.2016)

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I’ve shut down my photo site (Nov.2016)

My other blog was hacked

Feb 7, 2017 | online publishing | 0 comments

My other blog was hacked

Vic Pics blog hacked

My other blog, Vic.Pics, was hacked!
Luckily it wasn’t too bad.  Thankfully I have regular automatic WordPress back-ups to restore from.

I’d logged into the site’s Dashboard and installed some updates, I then clicked on “Visit Site” for a quick look before I started working on the next post.  I was shocked to see that the most recent post title had been changed to “hacked by NG689Skw”.  Clicking on the post revealed that the text and image had been deleted.

I had been using two factor authentication, where I needed my phone to log-in, so how had NG689Skw access my WordPress install?  Checking my settings revealed that my admin password hadn’t been disabled.  Doh!

My hosting provider, Crazy Domains, offers automatic back-up of WordPress installs, so I was easily able to roll-back the site to the previous back-up.  The next step was to try to prevent any further un-authorised access, so I also updated my settings, removing all password log-in methods.

The moral of this story is to ensure is to have back-ups of everything and use two factor authentication for your log-in.  Make sure you disable the legacy settings, so a password cannot be used to log-in.  That way you can spend more of your time writing and publishing.

 

This post contains affiliate links to my host provider, Crazy Domains.

I’ve shut down my photo site

Nov 27, 2016 | online publishing | 1 comment

I’ve shut down my photo site

URL of simonsphotosite.com screenshot

For over two years I’ve had a dedicated personal photo website.  It had the unimaginative name of “Simon’s Photo Site” with the URL of simonsphotosite.com  I haven’t used it much lately, but it was still costing me to keep it online, so when both the hosting and domain registration renewals arrived this month I decided it was time to end that project.

Since 2007 I’d shared much of my photography on Flickr (the free photo sharing site from YAHOO!).  Flickr was going through a lot of changes in 2014, upsetting many users, including myself, so I decided to look elsewhere.  I really liked what SmugMug was offering – a highly customisable personal site, with unlimited storage of full resolution photos and videos with a custom domain name.  I tinkered with Simon’s Photo Site for months, learning the SmugMug user features as I went, but once I was happy with the layout, I didn’t use it much more after that.  Sure it had hundreds of photos proudly displaying online, but it turned out to be more of a novelty.

After learning so much about SmugMug, I opened another account with them to host photos for my Vic Pics project.  Which now meant I was paying for two SmugMug services.  I couldn’t justify to myself paying for two accounts, so I decided to shut down the personal site.  The Vic Pics Gallery survives as the host and market site (by SmugMug) for my Vic Pics blog (which admittedly I have neglected recently, but plan to start spending time on again soon.)

Some pages from simonsphotosite.com can still be viewed on the Internet Way Back Machine.  The domain name registration has expired, but for now is re-directing to the Family Gallery page of this blog.

I may explore other options for a personal gallery in the future, such as 500px or the free options included with my Adobe Creative subscription.  Meanwhile, I have continued to post a few pictures onto Flickr – www.flickr.com/photos/smjb.  

Below is a couple of screenshots from Simon’s Photo Site before it went off line. 

Simon's Photo Site homepage screenshot

Another new WordPress Theme

Apr 10, 2016 | online publishing, Site | 0 comments

Editing WordPress using the Divi Theme

Editing WordPress using the Divi Theme

If you’ve read some earlier post of mine, you may have seen that I’ve been experimenting with different WordPress Themes for this site.  I’ve had to make some back-end changes to my web host to allow larger theme files to be uploaded and give myself a crash course in this highly customisable Theme builder called Divi.  With previous themes I’ve had to install various plug-ins to get the site performing how I wanted, now with the Divi Builder I can edit almost every element on the screen.  I really like how the pages will scale to suite what-ever screen it’s on, I’ve made the site as wide as possible (1920px) to utilise modern widescreen monitors, but it still looks good on a smaller window, laptop, iPad or phone.

The theme even has a couple of options to put the site into “maintenance mode”, to show a basic landing page for visitors that explains I’m working on the site without them seeing anying weird while I played around with everything.  After working on the site, on and off, over this weekend I’m about to take down the maintenance page and make the rest of the site live again.  I don’t doubt there be some more tweeks to make as I learn about Divi, but I’m really excited about the new look.  Down the track I’ll look at doing something with my other sites, especially Vic Pics.

New look to my personal website and blog using the new WordPress Theme called Divi.

New look to my personal website and blog

NOTE: Just in case the Divi theme doesn’t workout, I’ve re-published the blog’s previous format (up to 4th April) at sy.id.au/b4divi/blog