The blog has some changes ahead over the next few days, per­haps weeks. Some of my plans are still in a bit of flux and I’m learn­ing some new soft­ware, so con­sider this your advance notice if you find some­thing wonky here.

Why Make Changes?

There are a few reasons.

1. Traf­fic is grow­ing. There are always spikes and drop-​offs on dif­fer­ent days, but I’ve been watch­ing my met­rics and noticed a trend in growth. I’m happy to see that trend, so I want to accom­mo­date it.
2. I had an out­age a few weeks ago. It’s never any fun when you can’t get to your own web site, because that means other vis­i­tors can’t get to your web site. That sort of thing tends to put a dent in rea­son #1, so I want to try and mit­i­gate rea­sons for future outages.
3. My site per­for­mance is down. It’s tak­ing longer to load my page, and that’s also bad for rea­son #1. Peo­ple want a snappy web expe­ri­ence. Sites either deliver good per­for­mance or peo­ple go else­where. Also, Google seems to include per­for­mance fac­tors in its rank­ing results. A bump in per­for­mance could equal a bump in rank­ings. At the very least, I can try to avoid slip­ping in search rankings.
4. It’s time for a fresh coat of paint. I use the ProPhoto Blogs theme on Word­Press and I like it. How­ever, I also believe that it’s part of the rea­son my per­for­mance is slip­ping. This theme has a lot of over­head — use­ful over­head if you’re not a pro­gram­mer who likes dig­ging into CSS code. Bulk is bulk, though. I’m toy­ing with some alter­na­tives for a lean site with a fresh look.

Tell Us About the Changes Ahead

Basi­cally, the changes are to help me deal with the issues I men­tioned. Here’s how I plan to address those concerns.

1. I’m mov­ing to a Vir­tual Pri­vate Server (VPS). As a small blog­ger, I was happy to live on a shared host­ing envi­ron­ment. That means that my blog resides along with sev­eral other blogs — none of which I know about — on the same server. It’s sort of like “We all live in a Yel­low Sub­ma­rine”, but we’re not allowed to leave our compartments.The prob­lem with that arrange­ment is that we share resources blindly. If some­one else uses a lot of hot water, there’s none left for my shower. In a com­put­ing envi­ron­ment, that means my CPU uti­liza­tion and RAM aren’t guar­an­teed. If another site has a poor con­fig­u­ra­tion and hogs the resources, my site suffers.A Vir­tual Pri­vate Server takes a slice of a computer’s resource and ded­i­cates them solely to me. I know I can count upon a spe­cific amount of CPU, RAM, band­width, disk space and processes. It also gives me quite a bit more admin­is­tra­tive flex­i­bil­ity. Why go vir­tual instead of just ded­i­cat­ing my own hard­ware? Because a Vir­tual server is scal­able. A phys­i­cal server is always too small or too large. As my site grows, I can pay a lit­tle more to increase my resources to meet my needs, rather than pay­ing a much larger amount to exceed my needs with a phys­i­cal server.
2. Not only does a VPS pro­vide ded­i­cated resources, but it pro­vides a ded­i­cated oper­at­ing sys­tem. Who knows what those other sites are upload­ing and down­load­ing? If one of them screws up a sys­tem file or the OS, then it screws my site, too. A VPS is sim­ply more secure than a shared host­ing environment.
3. I’ve been very happy using ProPhoto Blogs. In fact, I haven’t totally decided to replace it here. I’m lean­ing that way, though. One of the things that I like about it is the abil­ity to share a large photo on the ini­tial dis­play. Of course, that is a double-​edged sword because it’s not a good thing for mobile vis­i­tors. As my traf­fic increases, so does the per­cent­age of users on mobile devices. My cur­rent theme isn’t serv­ing mobile users very well and there are other themes with Respon­sive designs that han­dle dif­fer­ent dis­plays bet­ter than my cur­rent theme.

One More Thing

My plan when I started this blog was just to have a place to share my pho­to­graphic jour­ney. Basi­cally, it was a place to post a photo and share a silly story to go with it. That’s been fun, but I’m find­ing that I want to go in a bit of a dif­fer­ent direc­tion. I have more infor­ma­tion to share, which doesn’t always relate to the photo that I’m ready to post. I need to find a bet­ter way of shar­ing use­ful infor­ma­tion as well as shar­ing pho­tos that I hope folks will enjoy. As I said, I’m still work­ing out the details as I go through the other sys­tem upgrades. The idea is to make this site a bet­ter place to visit, so let’s hope I suc­ceed instead of blow­ing up the whole thing.