Welcome to the new weblog! The software I had been using had sufficient issues that I decided to move to a whole new piece of software. Further, I wanted to build a new web server with lots of space and make it possible for Nina and perhaps some other family members to set up their own weblog. That work is now done.

I decided to use WordPress as found on SourceForge. There is good support for the software, along with a pretty good Wiki. Lots of good documentation is available on the Wiki as well as links to some pretty good instructions on changing the look of the blog. Further, WordPress is almost completely configurable from the web. All of the display templates can be modified from the web. Users can be managed from the web. Command line access to the server is not required. There are a number of plugins for the software as well, one of which provides pretty good management of uploaded images. I’ve still got a few minor things to do, such as implement notifications for people who have subscribed. Anyone getting the RSS feed will need a new URL as well: https://www.rnsmith.com/wp-rss2.php.

I’ve got a new boss at work. The fellow I was working for was based in Belgium and has resigned to do something new. I’m now reporting to a new person in Pocatello. That changeover will keep me pretty busy at work for the next several weeks and will necessitate a trip to Belgium in early January. My passport expires in March, so I’ve got to figure out how to do the travelling and get the new passport issued. I’ll probably have to do the expensive expedited passport service as soon as I get back from Belgium in January.

So, the new website is now operational. The old server will get rebuilt and become the development server. When that’s finished, I’ll be able to completely retire two servers out of my network. That’ll be a good thing as one of the older servers is starting to make some noise like a fan or a hard drive might be starting to fail. I’ve moved from Fedora to SuSe 9.1for the server software. That has turned out to be a good move as well. SuSe is much easier to setup, configure, and maintain. I’m quite pleased with the difference. Fedora is just too unstable for my purposes and I’m not very happy with the direction that RedHat has taken overall. So, that’s the news from Pocatello, Idaho on this cold, wintery evening.