Host Changeover

Due to our current host awardspace.com offering such a poor value package and being populated by the most obnoxious, unhelpful ’support’ team on the face of the planet, we are delighted to be parting company and moving to another host. Unfortunately, due to my rather miniscule knowledge of how all this works, I’m sure it’ll take longer that I would like.

Over the next few days I’m sure the site will vanish then reappear at will, but please bear with me as all will be back to nomal as soon as humanly possible.

Thanks

Google, I Know my Place

Although this graph may resemble a backpacker’s bank balance as they travel from South East Asia to Australia on the latest leg of their round the world trip, it is, in fact, the graph of ubertramp.com’s Google search traffic over the past few days. Still, on the plus side, at least I ‘m guaranteed and increase in search traffic from here on in.

I guess this serves as conclusive proof that I am Google’s latest bitch. And why? Well, anyone who has been checking on the site over the past couple of weeks has probably already gathered this – but I’ve been doing a bit of early spring cleaning.

It’s been a good 5 minutes since I last updated the site, and as such felt a bit more tinkering (read: getting completely out of my depth with what I see as highly technical web issues) was well overdue. And despite being subjected to the inevitable search engine ‘virtual crucifixion’, I have to say it could have gone a lot worse…even if I do still flinch at that graph.

Essentially, Ubertramp needed a re-jig. Content was being buried, it was becoming a bit of a maze, and something had to be done. Unfortunately, as good as Wordpress is (personally, I think it’s the best blogging platform out there) it’s very nature – that of a blog – it’s always going to mean that earlier stuff that you’ve posted will start to get lost under the pile of more recently posted stuff (unless you are a wizard when it comes to deep linking in your posts – and I ain’t the world’s best deep linker).

The ol’ Google analytics confirmed this for me and it was amazing the difference in page views etc from old to new articles. Stuff was being neglected, overlooked, posts were beginning to get systematically banished to the darker depths of the uber-empire, and I simply couldn’t have that.

I needed a way to introduce a more user friendly and easily navigable structure whilst still retaining the blog. I ended up putting another CMS on the site for static content and buggering about with it until I worked out a way to run both parts side by side…hence the torrent of error 404’s and 500’s and a few more numbers that I hadn’t even heard of until 2 weeks ago.

Anyhow, the errors are now on the decrease and I’m beginning to win the server battle it would seem – and hopefully, sometime soon, we’ll see a few more exciting (at least for me) changes around here. I’ll keep you posted – in the meantime, why not have a nosey around. And, please, let me know if you discover any dead ends/broken pages…i’m sure there are still plenty in there Ta!.