Amazon Store

Heh, I had forgetten that I have a store on Amazon where I highlight items mentioned here. I had strayed away from this Amazon store for awhile, trying different things, but the store’s still there so why not clean it up?

I removed some older products and added in more items including a section dedicated to the Olympus OM-D EM10 Mk II. I added a few more sections and moved products around to better fit the new sections. This store is also a good place for me to bookmark often used consumables that I need to restock on periodically.

Menus

I didn’t like the feel and flow of my previous menus, so I changed things up a little. I’m still not certain if the current menus will stay though. I need to include more categories to really capture the content on my site. Building these content pages are harder than I would have thought unless I’m doing it wrong.

Email Subscription

Although I had never sent out an email newsletter for Pulpconnection before, I did set up a TinyLetter account where you can sign up to get email notifications. And yes, I actually did send out my first email newsletter this weekend (more so to learn about TinyLetter). Will I keep this up? Not sure, but again, it is a resource that I can tap into.

Fruity Background

With a 20% discount at iStock, I figured it was time to get a high quality image to serve as the background image of Pulpconnection. Going with a pulpy theme, I like the dark wood backdrop with the bright citrus fruit accents.

So take a look around and rediscover Pulpconnection like I have. Sign up for email updates and check out (and maybe even buy) stuff from my Amazon store.

Um, yeah, I dunno. But Kimi (let’s call her that) wants to share her experience eating a $14 peach or something like that. Intrigued? Actually yes, I am. Don’t let the pulpy readers down, Kimi!

I was only aware of this since the UpdraftPlus backup plugin wouldn’t run its automated backups. UpdraftPlus itself would complain about incomplete actions. On a hunch, I disabled Evergreen Post Tweeter since it times the posting of old posts on Twitter. Sure enough, after disabling Evergreen Post Tweeter, WordPress started behaving normally. Scheduled posts published on cue, and I have yet to see incomplete actions reported by UpdraftPlus.

But…

I did it wrong or at least didn’t really have a good understanding of what I was getting into. While secured communications is a good thing, I didn’t realize how much unsecure communications was actually going on. Pictures are not loading and some widgets are busted, assumedly trying to use http versus https.

That and my site’s certificate has an unfortunate mismatch due to the www prefix. Yeah, times have changed, and the URL convention of starting with www is no longer the norm. So the certificate I got from Let’s Encrypt is for pulpconnection.net, not www.pulpconnection.net. Yes, it matters.

I may be able to reconfigure my site to remove the leading www, but I’m not sure what havoc that may cause. So for now, I’ll leave things as is, but if you go to https://www.pulpconnection.net, your browser should warn you of a mismatch. This is (mistakenly) intentional until I can figure out how to fix it

All I can say is mahalo to ParkRat and his fan base!

So now, I’m temporarily installing the Canvas theme and tweaking it. If this unusual behavior is due to an expired theme license, I’m bummed that’s how it works and may have to find a new theme that still behaves even though expired.

http://????????.ws/?????????????????????????????

Unfortunately pasting the linkmoji into a blog post doesn’t work. The above link should look like this.

• portague jokes
• howie haiwaiian mainlander

While I don’t define portague jokes, the post, 21 Slang Words You Should Know Before Visiting Hawaii, discusses haole aka howie haiwaiian mainlander.

Nice. Very nice.

As a starting point, I disabled a bunch of WP plugins. Doing so appears to have cleared the backlog of scheduled tasks. Now to start re-evaluating the plugins to really see if I need them. Then activate them one by one to see if the scheduler problem reappears.

More testing to do…

See @abaggy, I told you the new BMW i3 stirs up controversy as it got the most comments on my blog this year. Oh, and thanks for being the most active Pulpconnection commenter.

Check out Pulpconnection’s 2014 annual blogging report.

Notice anything different around here? Actually, Pulpconnection has been different since the end of August, but I just didn’t have the focus to summarize the changes. So on a quiet Sunday morning with a cup of Nespresso, I’m motivated to list the changes.

New Look

First and foremost, you’ll notice the new look of Pulpconnection. For years, I’ve used the Thesis theme then added the Chronicl look. This was a fun, playful combination.

While I’ve been a fan of the Thesis theme since 2009, I wanted a fresh new look. Thesis is still awesome, but I didn’t want to spend the time building my own look using Thesis 2. So while wandering around the web, I came across On Topic by WooThemes. What struck me about On Topics was its “bigness.” Everything looks so big and easy to see. This readability aspect was the biggest motivator to switch. I love my blogging bling, but all those widgets become distractions. I still have them, but they’re on the bottom of the page leaving you the readers a less cluttered view.

Along with widgets only in the footer, On Topic features a header that moves. On the home page, the “header” is vertical, but on posts and pages, the header goes horizontal, allowing for more space for content.

Customization of On Topic is available though much more limited that with Thesis. Thesis still provides way more options to customize aspects of your WordPress site. I’ll miss that about Thesis. WooThemes includes lots of Google fonts with On Topic though I’ve seen strange characters suddenly appear. Not sure what or why.

I also changed Pulpconnection’s home page to show excerpts of blog posts instead of full posts like before. I like the way On Topic displays its excerpts with the featured image. Sorry, you need to click on the Continue Reading button to see the full post.

New Menus

I’ve changed up some of the menus since On Topic has less options for menus than Chronicl. I spent some time and filled out my Travels section including more trips from the past. I also started adding my annual Kicks Analysis series. The most interesting addition is in the Around Hawaii menu. Click on that to see a map of Hawaii along with geo-tagged Pulpconnection posts.

Favicon

Yes, Pulpconnection now has one. See that 16×16 pixel image of oranges in your browser bar? That’s the favicon for Pulpconnection created with the Favicon Generator. The green limes weren’t recognizable in a favicon size so oranges it is.

DreamPress

Like I already mentioned, Pulpconnection is now using Dreamhost’s DreamPress managed service. For its price, I don’t how you can compete with a VPS. I could never afford the 1.5+ GB of memory consumed by this site.

WordPress 4

To compound all the changes, WordPress 4 coincidentally released while all the above was going on. So why not make things harder? Yup, upgraded to WordPress 4.

What’s Left

As always, there are things to do. DreamPress includes Varnish, but I understand the simultaneous use of a caching plugin and Cloudflare is possible. Not sure if using all of these makes sense, so I’ll take this slow.

Lastly, I started looking into email subscription services. I haven’t made a choice yet since they’re different. WordPress’ JetPack includes an email subscription widget (which is in the footer) yet it doesn’t provide a simple URL link to sign up with. The venerable Feedburner has had email subscriptions forever and provides a link. Then there’s Tiny Letter. It’s like neither JetPack or Feedburner, allowing for email newsletters unrelated to blog posts. I’m gonna drag my feet on this one, trying to figure out the best pulpy answer.

And there we have all the changes making the new look of pulp.

There, it’s done. Pulpconnection is back, and this time it’s running on Dreamhost’s managed WordPress service called DreamPress. Over the years, I went from a shared server to a virtual private server (VPS) that gave me more control but meant that I had to exert more control. That’s good and bad. There were times when things went haywire, and I didn’t know why. Of course, craziness could still happen with DreamPress, but at least, there’s dedicated support and more importantly a scalable platform. Instead of me allocating more memory to servers, DreamPress does the magic. How I don’t know. Like I said, magic.

The cost too of DreamPress is hard to argue. Right now, DreamPress is discounted to $20 a month. Try squeezing in enough memory allocation on a VPS for $20 a month. Doesn’t get you much. So by switching to DreamPress, I can reduce my VPS resources significantly for my other projects, more than $20 a month.

There’s more to learn about DreamPress, but overall I think there’s less to know like fine tuning WP installs and optimizing WP. The biggest learning curve for DreamPress is actually getting DreamPress to work for Pulpconnection. Dreamhost has an automated feature that converts existing “one-click” WordPress installs to DreamPress. Unfortunately for me, Pulpconnection wasn’t a one-click install or maybe it was back in the day but doesn’t now qualify as “one-click.” So what does that mean? A manual transfer to DreamPress.

For this Mac user, working via the command line is a frightening endeavor. Fortunately, there are good instructions, specifically this Migrating to DreamPress post. Read it and reread it. It’s all there. Okay, I noticed one or two minor changes, but they weren’t show stoppers. The scp secure copy created an extra subdirectory for the copied files but that was fixed with the Move to Parent feature in Panic’s Transmit.

The other scare was importing the Pulpconnection SQL database backup. From PHPMyAdmin, I found the Import tool, but the database was simply too large for the max import size. Dreamhost chat tech support came through by directing me to import through the shell. I had to literally write out the command line on paper to make sure I had all the parameters correct. Less than a minute later, the SQL import was silently done.

So here we are. Hopefully, less technical headaches and notifications that Pulpconnection servers had to restart for whatever reason. And definitely less stress for me.