The domain registration completed this morning, so I’ve been working on transferring files over and fixing broken links.
The blog is the only working subdomain so far, which means my aplastic anemia site still needs to be moved. And I haven’t re-pointed feedburner to my new RSS feed yet.
I’ll be making some major changes to the website over the next month.
The first piece is to transfer domain registration to a new host. I know when I’ll be submitting the transfer request, but it’s up to the domains to play nice with eachother on the handoff. So that could be a few days, and it could be a few weeks. I already have an account hosting at the new host, so hopefully the transition will mean little to no downtime.
A preview of the new site can be had here:
http://www.brendangates.org/
(That link is just a preview – don’t bookmark it. When the new site goes live it will be at the same brendangates.com address you already know. My .org site is just my sandbox to play around in.)
I’m also taking steps to make sure that my feedburner feed will continue to work, even though I’ll be switching from blogger to self-hosted wordpress. So if you’re subscribed through feedburner you should be fine. If you’re subscribed directly to my feed address, that may end up breaking on you.
The second piece to the redesign will be my aplastic anemia site. I had a working mockup of a redesign a few months ago, but I think I’d rather start over again and try a different route. Not sure what I really want out of that site, but I’m in no hurry to figure that out either.
I received another couple random emails from people about my aplastic anemia site this past month. For the last few years that’s happened only every month or so, but more recently it’s increased to a few a month. In light of this, I’ve decided to redesign the whole thing in a way that would let these visitors interact with the site more. I did some reading about content management systems and I decided to go with Drupal. I like nerdy projects like this, so getting to start a new one is always fun.
This is my old aplastic anemia site:
http://aplasticanemia.brendangates.com/
This is my new aplastic anemia site:
http://drupal.brendangates.org/
Well, it’s almost my new site. That’s a test server that I have it running on (.org) and once I work out the kinks, the new site will assume the address of the old site.
Anyway, being a work in progress, the new site has a few known bugs and to do items:
– OpenID doesn’t work yet
– Messages sent to another user via their profile cannot be retrieved
– No links page yet (this will be a prominent component)
– Need to set up creative commons licensing
– Maybe create a logo?
– Search doesn’t work for content (only Users?)
If you’d like to poke around and give me some feedback, I would be much obliged. A lot of late night work went into it, so a fresh set of eyes would be helpful.
(Keep in mind that I may not be able to import user IDs to the production server when I eventually turn it on, since that may be a little above my pay grade. So in the off chance that you are reading this post because you Googled “aplastic anemia” and found this site; please be patient with me.)