At first glance you probably won’t notice any/many appearance or function differences in the Flying Colours cruising blog.  But under the covers it’s almost a whole new site.  Over the past two months I’ve had two WordPress and internet site experts working on the software behind the blog, and they’ve done a bang-up job of bringing it up to date. 

As you can see from the Archives at right, my blog began in May, 2010, which is essentially the Dark Ages in today’s software world.  To get the site up and running back then I hired the brother-in-law of a young woman who worked in our marketing department at our old software company – a guy who knew what he was doing, but was very troublesome to work with – and he quit just as the project ended and I lost any further support from him.  No matter . . . the site ran just fine, and I continued for all these years without so much as a hint of problem. 

Then last fall, we had our totally cruise-less summer of 2020 due to Covid-19 and the closing of the U.S./Canadian border. We didn’t cruise at all for the first time in over 10 years and I hadn’t made any blog posts for the entire year.  A few months ago I attempted to log into the blog.  What the . . . ?  All I got was a blank white screen, and no matter what I did, I couldn’t get the blog to open.     

Dang!  I felt like a “former guy” who had just been dumped by Twitter and Facebook!  But how could that be?  For these past 12 years, I’ve just been peacefully trippin’ along, trying not to offend anyone with my writing, and staying within the bounds of civility and truthfulness. 

So . . . could my ISP have decided that I was past my prime?  Did one of the Russian bots that have been relentlessly trying to break into my blog finally succeed (honestly, every time I posted a new blog, they would wake up and dozens of bot attempts would show up, trying to wiggle into my blog code – as an access point to get across to something much larger – like the pipeline ransomware fiasco going on right now on the East Coast).  I had no idea which – of a dozen possibilities – might have triggered this.

When I couldn’t get anywhere with the problem, I enlisted the aid of my good friend, Dave Roeser. a former software developer at my old software company (Mainstar), and who now runs his own PC consulting company to help bloggers like me track how many readers are coming to their site (and help them get more readers).  Dave quickly identified the problem – just about every feature and function in my blog was outdated and now unsupported (“deprecated” is the word he loves to use) by WordPress and my internet service provider. 

My WordPress “theme” – the backbone of the blog that controls the format of it – was no longer supported, the home page photo slideshow that rotates through my favorite cruising photos is not supported, and the software code that my original blog site developer wrote to oversee and manage the user login function was written in a language version that was no longer supported.  In short, my blog was toast!

The last thing I wanted to do was spend a bunch of money getting the blog site totally redesigned and back up to snuff.  At the same time, I didn’t want to give it up completely.  So Dave gave me a suggestion that I talk with a lady named Katie Zech who recently started her own WordPress design and support company (Zech Design, www.zechdesign.com), and she proposed a plan that I felt comfortable with, not only in price, but the scope of what she would do (i.e., not redesign the whole world, when what I really wanted was to get all that I previously had back up and running on fully supported software).  Katie began her work in mid-March, and now at May 13^th she has handed it back to me and I feel comfortable with how it runs. This blog post is a test of that.

As you can see, we dumped the idea of requiring everyone to obtain a username with a password for access to the site. Making that decision was a big bugaboo, as it meant I had to reconcile to the fact that people I don’t know and trust will have access to it.  Instead, anyone can now read it (if they can find it).  If they like what they see, users can now Subscribe to the blog, simply by filling in their e-mail address in the Subscribe box at lower right, and they will then get notice of each new blog post that I make.  Subscribing will cause the blog to send a confirmation e-mail to the subscriber’s e-mail address – and once they click on the confirmation it will tell the person they’ve successfully subscribed.  From that point on, each new blog post that I put up will cause a “newsletter” e-mail to be sent to the entire subscriber list to notify them of the new post.  They can either read the blog post directly from that e-mail, or sign in to www.ronf-flyingcolours.com to have access to the full site.

Importantly, there’s now a working Contact tab (at the top right of the home page), where any reader can send a message to me, telling me I’m full of it, or whatever they want to write (and if I don’t like it I have the right not to read it) – and the contact messages are available only to me. 

The only feature that’s not working correctly at this point is the Current Location feature.  Yes, if you click on it you’ll get a map of where I am, but its currently the SPOT map, not the really good Google Map. It defaults to a street map, and you have to manually click on the Map icon (third from the top on the right side) to get it into Satellite mode. Google Maps changed the API “key” necessary to transfer the SPOT map over to Google Maps, and we don’t have that code working yet. 

Even though we haven’t had Flying Colours out on the water much in the past 18 (or so) months, we’ve done a couple of cruises down and back to Seattle for periodic maintenance, and these always produce enough good adventures – and photos – that in a couple of weeks I’ll have my first honest blog post since July, 2019.  Stay tuned.

I hope all of you are well, and have stayed away from Covid-19.

Ron