Welcome everyone to the all new tinkleflick.com. I know, I know, it’s not nearly as fancy as the old site. However, while it might be less fancy, I finally have given up the holy grail of trying to both write the content for our website AND write and maintain the code. The old website was, if I say so myself, very cool. With the flash graphics, rollover top menu tabs and everything I was pretty proud of it. And, with that site, I actually wrote all of the code by hand that supported it.
As geeky-cool and fun as that was, it took a lot of time and I ended up having to split the time that I did have to spend on the website between writing content and constantly fixing and updating the code. As those of you who paid close attention noticed, many of the features never really got rolled out because I never really had time to write the code to support them. Plus, as I have mentioned to a few close friends, I have identified the arrival of baby tinkleflick as a golden opportunity to re-brand the website.
So, I have finally given up (for now) and went with a pre-packaged blogging system that does most of what the old site did but for which the code is actually free. I decided to use WordPress which is a free, open-source system that anyone can download and install easily. I seriously took me about 10 minutes to get it downloaded, installed and up-and-running. If you already have a hosting service, I highly recommend it. If you are planning to set up your own blog, I highly recommend WordPress. I purchased a system a few years ago called pmachine, which is OK, but WordPress is WAY better.
OK, so there you have it. I just realized that my spare time is extremely valuable to me and that spending that spare time with Wendy and Noah was much more important to me that geeking out for hours on end with PHP and MySQL books spread out all over the office (as much fun as that is…and I actually do think it is fun!!) but everyone seems to really like the website so I want to continue to produce it. Now, I can spend some time writing witty comments for you all to read and make some pictures available and we all should be satisfied.
If you really liked the old version of the site, don’t worry too much. Some day, after Noah and his sibling are off to college, I’ll sit down and code the perfect website.
Heres’ to more content, even if the presentation is not quite as slick.
Cheers,
Ralph