Bits and Pieces

I’ve Transferred the links I missed from the old server for the second time to here. After my ISP crashed two or three times I’m glad today there were no crashes.

I’ve deleted most content from the old server now. Finally I can concentrate on other things than going backward and forward. Especially on the enormous backlog of posts I want to publish here.

Nobody tells you that when you export and import a WP site the photos you’ve uploaded get resized. In itself that is not so much of a problem, but but but, all of a sudden I find photos in duplicate triplicate or quadruplicate, depending on when uploaded and at what size put here in the blog…when I moved to Thesis I was glad to be able to post photos of 600 pix width rather than the old 460 pix width that I used….and now all of a sudden I am using far more space on the servers than I used to do on the old server….darn another cleaning job to do.

I’ve been under the hood of the design and have removed the background photo of the garden, because I found looking at the blog as a whole it distracted too much from the photos and the content. In addition it seemed to load from the server as one of the last items which made loading annoyingly slow.

I’ve changed the logo to one that is simpler and where the name of the blog is a bit better visible and without the tag line

With the 1.6 Thesis theme it is very easy to change fonts, sizes and colors of characters and colors of backgrounds. All in all the design is a bit cleaner now.

The next step is to bring the links and archives to a separate page and bring back the number of posts to 5 rather than 10 on the landing page and remove some widgets as they slow up the site. But then I would like my pagination back.

Stay tuned.

Hot Michelin Star and Hotel Newbe: Niven Kunz

Niven-Kunz-_MG_2269

The new 2010 Michelin Guide has been published and this is Niven Kunz of Restaurant Niven in Rijswijk, a suburb of The Hague. Probably he is the youngest Dutch chef awarded with a Michelin Star, or does he only look very young? Anyway, he’s now also a hotelier with 2 rooms. Congratulations Niven with your star and welcome as fellow hotelier.

I took this bit dreamy portrait photo last week when he was showing off at the 2010 Food festival in The Hague which was very well organized.

You can congratulate him on Twitter as Niven Kunz

Apology for my ISP

If you tried to visit me today, there is a chance you did’t get contact. All servers of my ISP Yourhosting.nl were down between 2.15 pm and 4.31 pm. I’m sorry. Also I have to rethink my move from my prior provider to this provider….Last time this happened (when I catched them) was March 6

Here is the screen shot from the announcement in the Dutch language:

Your-Hosting-Down-Nov-23-2009

They claim always accessible in their footer or do they mean always up? Well today we missed 2 hours and 16 minutes. Added to the 7 hours of March 6 that makes 9 hour , 16 minutes of a total of 8,760 in a year. Not very significant, but very annoying if you are in full editing mode.

On the positive site is that they now have a twitter account that responds. My prior ISP has several twitter accounts that don’t respond.

Open – Railroad Bridge Bar with Restaurant in Amsterdam (Dutch Design 53)

Railroad Bridge Restaurant

When you are used to pottering canals in The Netherlands as I am, you know what a Railroad Bridge means: A place you usually have to wait for an awful long time. If you pass Amsterdam with a sailboat from which you cannot or don’t want to get the mast down, there is only one window to pass the railroad bridge that is located next to Amsterdam Central Station: Between 02.30 AM and 03.30 AM. You can have a pint of beer in the nearby Jordaan part of Amsterdam to have a bit fun during the waiting. If you are lucky there will be a folksinger in the café.
Open Amsterdam
Recently a railroad bridge that lost its function was permanently put in “Open” position.  Now Dutch architects have built a sort of glass conservatory on the bridge which got the combined function of a bar (café in Dutch who loaned that word from the French) with restaurant. Very aptly it was named Open

Cafe Reataurant Open Amsterdam

Via Architecten Web

Server Migration completed – Migraine stayed away


As you can see the background is back. It’s a photo of our precious garden at Haagsche Suites.

The logo is back with another photo of the same garden.

The Avatar is back, a bit bigger in size. The main reason is it fits the design of the blog better, but I was also thinking about enabling my readers to recognize me. Whenever you meet fellow bloggers or tweeps, or even maybe guests, many people complain that they cannot recognize people form their avatars. I wouldn’t like that to happen when you meet me 🙂

Missing posts are back. Still some comments are somewhere in the cellar. If I don’t find them please re place your comment.

Some links have to be added here yet.

At the same time I installed Thesis theme’s version 1.6 (b2 to be exact). I fine tuned some bits and pieces. It has now color included in its core. I used it to sbring back the page navigation an slightly enhanced the visibility thereof. I lost pagination as it seems to interfere with the Thesis theme now.

I believe the ability to quickly navigate is much more important than the loading speed of the site. Therefor I brought back the full visibility of the archives and categories in the site bar. I cannot get rid of some widgets I like, because they enable me to keep contact on several platforms with my readers. These widgets also make the site a little bit slow.

In the meantime I noticed that my Google PR (Page Rank) went down from 5 to 4, but on the other hand I got back some site links that now have their own Google PR.

Curious how the SEO will work out in the future. The migration caused many errors, but the XML-sitemap generator works fine now as the server works on PHP an MySQL versions 5 which WordPress advises.

Off to sleep a bit and then ahead with the blog again.

Added:

I said no migraine, but I’m not so sure about that anymore. I can’t get a working SEO Page plugin or the WP PageNavi plugin. They did function under the prior Thesis 1.5 version but apparently not under the present version combined with the present WP version.

Last edited by Happy Hotelier on November 22, 2009 at 6:17 pm