We’re finally retiring the vintage 1999 Pentium III 500 that’s been serving up our boat log. Moving to Ubuntu really extended its life, and even with just 384MB of RAM it’s been a faithful workhorse. When I first set it up to host the site, I used a canned installation of the LAMP stack (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) with Drupal already installed, but it was kind of weird: things in strange places, old versions of everything, etc. It made it possible to get online, although I’ve since figured things out a little bit and have decided to move to a hosted service, refresh the design, add a few features, and give the computer a needed rest.

Here’s a list of changes that coincide with the move to the hosted service:

  • Domain Name:  We’ve got our own domain now.
  • Logo:  Sailor Jerry inspired

  • Homepage Slideshow:  With a much larger picture
  • Customized Theme:  The old site embarrassingly used the default theme that comes with Drupal. While I’m still using 90+% of someone else’s theme, at least it’s different and I’ve done quite a bit of CSS and PHP customization (for me.)
  • Search Function:  How many times have you spent hours searching our site to relive that hilarious quip from late 2009?
  • Previous/Next Links:  Log entries now have traditional blog style “next” and “previous” links so that you can more easily move between entries.
  • Web Junk:  Spiffy dynamic dropdown doodad in the header menu for faster access to forecasts
  • Reorganized Static Pages:  The Our Boat page has absorbed some stuff from the old home page, and the links to our marina and sailing club have been put onto a links page. I think maybe websites don’t really have links pages any more, but I use it, damn it, and I’m keeping it.

Please update your links, especially if you’re among the 1’s of people who subscribe to our RSS feed.

 

"Prepare to fend off the bridge abutment."