Big website changes

During the last two weeks, I have been heavily working on the website, making big changes to the site layout/design, content and sections. I had no idea that the database I was running on before was so problematic…apparently I have been running it on a wrong character set all this time! It took me a while to convert the website content to the UTF8 standard encoding and even now I’m continuing to experience some problems with weird characters showing up in some posts, so please let me know if you see a bunch of weird characters showing up and I will take care of them.

On top of that, I decided to get rid of the “www” in front of our domain. I have always been using “www” in front of all of my domains and this year I changed my mind and decided to make the domain shorter. It was a painful decision, because it will affect search engine links and rankings, whether I like it or not.

I also decided to get rid of the old gallery and start over with a brand new one. Instead of putting junk into the gallery like I was doing before, I will only be uploading the best pictures that are worth staying in the gallery. Initially, I was going to reuse the same gallery software, but I decided to try a new one this time, which should be more integrated to our blog. So far, I like the results and I will be posting the first gallery in a couple of days, if everything works out as planned.

I’m sure you have already noticed the top of the main page where it says “Last Two Recipes from Lola”. It took me a while to figure it all out and I had to write custom code for that, but the top part will now automatically pull the latest two recipe images from Lola’s Recipes page. She has been busy with other projects lately, but promised to put up more recipes very soon!

Oh, and the new Nikon 70-200mm VR II is soo good!

Lola took this shot wide open at f/2.8, 1/5000th of a second. Simply incredible, one of the Nikon’s sharpest lenses ever!

Nikon 70-200mm VR II 100% Crop