ValenciaBlue

The purpose and the pursuit of content

Why am I here? Why these posts? These are existential questions, right? Since leaving my full-time job, I am doing a number of things to keep busy and fit. There’s a lot more time for reading, so I usually have a novel or non-fiction book on my nightside table. I even read several collections of “Calvin and Hobbes” comics for fun. Of course, I keep up with my bicycling and I still train like I was racing – albeit at a lower threshold. Finally, there’s the twice-weekly gym workouts to keep everything else in shape.

Of course, improving my Spanish is an ongoing challenge. ALERT: New Year’s resolution – I’ll need to return to classes to push myself to a new level in the coming year.

So, as to the reason that I write these posts. It’s the stuff between the bread slices – a bocadillo if you will. There’s a saying in the news business: You have to feed the beast. That means editorial content goes stale and needs to be constantly updated. Fortunately, I don’t have constant deadlines. I gave myself the arbitrary deadline of posting at least once a month. Usually, I start with an observation, then a picture to illustrate it, and finally a piece of prose.

Finding my way to the least expensive solution

As a hobby website, it needs to be low cost. That is, as close to free as possible. No subscriptions! Several months ago, I migrated this site and my wife’s two others to a new hosting provider. My objective was to trim expenses. In doing the research it seemed relatively easy. Go to cPanel, download the SQL database, copy over the files from the FTP and then upload to the new host. Do some stuff with the A Record and CNAME and, boom, it’s done. 

Since all these sites are small, personal affairs, there’s limited downside to messing this up. But it was still frustrating that this didn’t go as smoothly as envisioned. As the deadline approached for the then-current hosting plan to expire, I became increasingly worried about my ability to pull this off. Several sessions with technical support followed. Then I discovered that the cybersecurity settings on my browser prevented me from seeing the migrated sites correctly. So, I had spent a couple of unproductive weeks thinking it wasn’t working when it had, indeed, been a successful migration.

Once the first site was up and running, I finished the next two with only small tweaks needed.

After that “aha” moment, the process unfolded easily. Once the first site was up and running, I finished the next two with only small tweaks needed. Of course, there were some latent matters such as caching, which meant that my updates didn’t show up immediately. The plugin’s creator wanted an upgrade fee to do this automatically. I disabled it and went back to handling it manually.

Now comes the fun part

There was already content on ValenciaBlue.com, but I wanted to clean up some of the formatting. When I originally selected this site’s look, I needed to make some changes and add a child theme. I wanted to use a parallax effect on the homepage where the main picture stays in place and the web page scrolls over it. I liked the black (dark) version, so I went with that. Why? I thought it looked cool.

But I needed to change out all the images and create a style sheet of image ratios that looked best. For instance, the “featured image” in the posts is 4:3 because on the category page, that works well as the thumbnail. I use the free photo-editing application GIMP with my custom templates to standardize this. There’s also a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to speed up site loading. Again, I’m learning and re-learning a lot.

Being free has its own costs

If it’s free, it’s worth what you paid for it. Well, it isn’t that bad, but there were some major trade offs. As noted earlier, automation was replaced by doing it myself. I have these, long copious notes of what I did previously to help guide me should I need to revisit some of the settings.

One example is trying to create a map with pictures of the various rotundas around Valencia. Years ago, I used Google maps with a KML file to create this. In the ensuing years, Google converted content to a paid option, but has a free version with a watermark for web developers. I didn’t like the look of that, so I found this service, Pic2Map.

The problems arose when I needed to upload the photos. After some trial and error, I managed to get the JPG images created with the EXIF geodata to upload. Then came the issue of how to get it on my webpage. There was no embed feature, so I cheated with an iFrame. Simply put, I created a hole in my webpage where the map image would show from another website.

Then the map disappeared. So I recreated it, but this time I copied the HTML code out of the original page and embedded that. Along the way I cleaned out some of the extraneous content areas. However, the images disappeared and some of the locations were wrong. One of these days I’ll get around to repairing it, but at least I know what to do in the future.

It’s a quick fix, but it’s functional.

At the end of the day, it’s a sideline

This isn’t a profit-making enterprise and it fully meets the criteria of a hobby. But my creative process usually runs along the lines of “How do I do this?” or “How do I recreate this effect or style?” Then I set about how to make it happen.

The featured image for this post was created using a free-trial AI website. It does show the limitation of artificial intelligence since it looks to me as soulless, but it proves my point. Let’s try to see what happens next. I fully admit with some time and practice, it’d look better but I wanted to test the concept first.

Obviously, I’m more drawn to the technical aspects of running a website. Though content is king, it’s a secondary issue to me. It gives me an excuse, a reason for trying something new and learning in the process. At times I’m happy with the outcome, other instances not so much. But there’s always satisfaction in the attempt.