My blog is back now after some downtime. After I moved to a new town, as I was settling in, creating a new paypal account and new bank account in the new city, my web hosting bill was several days late by the time I got all that set up, so my Web Hosting provider, Future Hosting, deleted my websites, and offsite backups that I had. I had several backups saved to my D: drive on my computer, but while my computer was in the shop getting a new motherboard, the tech guy swapped my C: and D: drives around, which I think was very unprofessional, thats why your supposed to mark where stuff goes before you remove it, thats the first thing we were taught in my A+ IT Technican class at Ivy Tech, but anyways, those were the only backups I had, so I lost my website.
For awhile after that, I had decided not to have a website at all. As I loose more and more of my sight, I knew maintaining a website was going to be a challenge, so I figured the best thing to do was just leave it down, but then as I got to playing around with Window Eyes more, the software that makes Computers accessible to blind people, I began to realize I could still maintain a website, I would just have to use the pre-built and automated tools instead of designing my own layouts like I had always done before.
So I began a search for a new Hosting Provider, since I was not going to stay with Future Hosting, after deleting my account and all my offsite backups like that. I found web hosting for $10 a year, which is an awesome deal, so I decided to go with it and put my blog back up today. I wasn’t getting any visitors to the main content of the site anyway, so I decided to put just the blog up, and leave everything else I had down. I’ll probably bring the games back, but I don’t remember which ones I had, so I’ll have to add them back one by one as I remember which ones I had.
It kinda stinks starting a website from scratch again after 15 years of all that design work I put into my old site. Due to the fact that my vision is nearly gone, I had to download a pre-made wordpress theme and just use that, along with using cpanel to automate the process of getting wordpress, the blog software I use, installed. I can’t see well enough to design my own website theme like I had before, but as I learn how to use this Window Eyes program a bit more in the coming months, I’ll get the hang of designing again, its just going to take time.
Feel free to leave me a comment. I’m still playing with this theme a bit. I’ll be adding and removing sidebar items as I remember what I had before. Instead of hand-coding the sidebar items in like I did before, I decided to try the wordpress widget thing, that way I don’t have to sit here and code. Widgets are like plug-and-play sidebar items, which will be a lot easier for me then editing a bunch of php files.
Its good to have the site back up after all this time. If you have a facebook account, feel free to leave a comment using the “connect to facebook” plugin I added. I had a little bit of a problem getting the facebook plugin installed, so if you notice any problems with it, or with the site itself, feel free to post a comment, and I’ll see what I can do about it.
The facebook connect plugin is really neat, instead of having to type in your name, email, website name, and all that to make a comment here, the facebook plugin logs you in to make a comment using your facebook account. Then when you come back again to visit, it keeps you logged in. My brother in-law and my sister have the same plugin installed on their blogs, and I thought it was cool, so I added it to mine too.
You’ll notice that the first time you leave a comment, your comment won’t be posted right away. That is because wordpress has a feature called whitelisting, which means that your first comment posted here has to be approved by me before its published. Once its approved by me, then future comments you leave here will be posted as soon as their submitted. Its kinda a neat feature wordpress has, cuts down on the comment spam quite a bit just from that feature alone.
Another thing I thought about doing, is requiring a facebook account to comment here. While I think everyone should have a facebook account, I realize not everyone does, so I’ll keep comments open to non facebook users too, but I could always turn that off by clicking one box in the settings.
Well thats all I can think of to say for now. Its good to have my site back again.
Hey Tom! Glad to see you have your blog back up and running. I’ve often thought of a blog, but then it seems a bit redundant, what with my running a message forum. Stop by my Fuller Brush site and let me know what you think and most of all, keep hanging in there and don’t let the butt heads of the world get you down!!
Hey Tom, There’s a backup of your old site at Archive.org: http://web.archive.org/web/20080126191335/http://www.tcoburn.com/ – I hope this is useful to you!
My brother has had a visual impairment from birth due to Cerebral Palsy, so I’ll have to check out Window Eyes.
Good luck with the blog!
Hi Tom, I saw that you left a comment on adambreckler.com/setting-up-facebook-connect-for-wordpress that your facebook connect was giving you an application under construction error. I am having the same error and can’t figure out how to fix it. Can you tell me how you did?