Parallel Lives

It’s finally happened! After a lot of soul searching, an inadvertent loss of weeks of work, a last-minute lockout from my hosting server, and a little more soul searching about how to integrate what is old and new, and I’ve finally got my new site design and lay out in place.

It might have taken a couple of months longer than I was expecting, and far longer than I was wanting, but I have a nice new site, and a much simpler set of tools to keep it looking pretty. Not only that, but the website address is far more rational – appearing at the top level of xavieredwards.com, and not some random directory underneath it all.

I haven’t destroyed the old site, as yet, given that there are many websites that are pointing directly to some of my older pages. Gradually I will be redirecting those older links to the new content but, in the meantime, the new and the old will live side by side. This post is actually the first content that is purely being posted on the new site, and will not appear on the older formatted site.

Once I have redirected all the inbound links I will be archiving the site for my own historical benefit and then removing it from the internet completely. If I do it right, there should be no way for anyone to reach any redirected content on the older site, so it isn’t going to make any difference to visitors, other than that they will only get to see the wonderful new site, and not the older one.

I am still to determine whether to use proper permalinks for each blog entry, and book entry, and if I do, what format they will take.

Already my rss feeds for both my books, and my blog should be redirected to my new site layout, so anyone visiting off my feeds will be coming onto the new layout. The same should be the case for the sites which re-host my blog content.

Another benefit to the new layout is that paragraphs are now working properly across my site and the re-hosted sites. There were some issues previously, where paragraph delimiters weren’t appearing in the same manner across different sites, but that should hopefully all be addressed now.

If things end up going well, I will also be looking at enabling comments directly on the site, rather than having to redirect visitors to one of the re-hosted locations if they want to leave comments.

Perhaps, now that the redesign is in place, I can stop procrastinating and get back to writing....