I need to find new hosting for NJPineBarrens.com. The folks that are hosting the server now and myself are disagreeing about some things.
I'm torn between going to shared hosting (is NJPB really that big?) and the desire for root access on my box (hey, I want to install this package.)
I've been using Dreamhost for shared hosting for ages, but I don't think they'd be able to handle the load that NJPB brings. The idea of MediaTemple's (gs) Grid-based shared hosting sounds great, but they get pretty mixed reviews from people online. The last one was a guy on SomethingAwful who said that his site had been hacked and MT had been unresponsive in getting back to him.
I don't make any money on NJPB, so I don't want to invest a ton of money each month, but at the same time it seems like most of the cheaper dedicated or vps servers are very underpowered.
Why can't there be cheap, decent hosting?
One of the best things about having a Jeep again is that I can get back to exploring the Pine Barrens. I've been reading through "Iron in the Pines" by Arthur Pierce, and in the chapter about Quaker Bridge, he mentions a cranberry bog right along Quaker Bridge Road. I've been up and down that road a million times, and I've never noticed the bog that he was talking about. A little exploring with USAPhotoMaps and I was able to locate the bog. I won't retype my trip report here, you can read the post on my forums. Here's a link to the pictures I took.
The side effect of all of this exploration is that I really want to take NJPineBarrens.com to the next level. In a previous post here I mentioned that every time I redesign the site it ends up being way more trouble than it's worth, but the reality is that I haven't been satisfied with the site running WordPress, I haven't been satisfied with the design, and I haven't been satisfied with the presentation of the content.
I've decided that I'm going back to Joomla. I want to go with Joomla 1.5 RC3, although maybe by the time I'm ready it will be released in final version. I tried Drupal, more specifically vBDrupal, which is designed to be integrated with vBulletin forums. A lot of people rail on Drupal for being complicated, and for sure it is, but by far the biggest drawback - at least in my opinion - is that it's delivered to the webmaster too spartan. To build your site, you're left having to load various plugins to do nearly everything - and a lot of them don't work 100%. Important items like a WYSIWYG editor for articles are available as plugins, not as part of the core Drupal distribution. TinyMCE, which is what Joomla as well as WordPress use, is a plugin for Drupal, but has some serious problems with Firefox. (Specifically <b> tags being generated for bold text, instead of <strong>) I'm going back to Joomla because - while Joomla's content organization and SEO is not on par with Drupal, the core components to publish articles are all there, and I can just integrate Joomla with vBulletin by using the plugin that I paid for at BBPixel.
So, this leads me to the visual design. I've been using the current design at NJPB for about two years now. There's a somewhat fluid center column that is either a max of 1050 pixels, or a minimum of 760 (or thereabouts.) There's a bit of Javascript that loads in a random image on the top of the screen with the site logo, and a navigation bar below it. My users like the random image, so I'll figure out some way of including that in the new design, but I really need to clean it up and make it way more interesting.
I found some interesting links tonight - 60 Elegant and Appealing Designs, Current Web Site (ironically enough served in ColdFusion), Liquid Web Design, and Don't Decorate - Communicate. I'm going to be scouring those over for inspiration. I want to go with a "less-is-more" theme, with lots of easy to find and read content.
I swear, once I get the site looking how I want, I'll be adding more content to it!