Well that last post got a little morose in places, didn’t it? No such nonsense this time around! (I can’t guarantee that it will be nonsense free, just free of morose nonsense.) I’m also trying to write a little more regularly than previously, which should be made all the more easier by virtue of the fact that I have finally migrated the site away from Joomla onto WordPress. Whether that matters, of course, is anyone’s guess because I’m not even sure anyone reads any of this! We’ve also finally started making plans for mine and Brad’s epic adventure of driving Betty and Carlos over to Wolfsburg and (hopefully) back.
I’ve had Joomla sites on and off for a good few years now – it’s now almost 5 years since the whole History Direct thing went pearshaped – but the problem was that migrating from 2.5 to 3 was proving more than my poor little melon could cope with. After the whole debacle of losing the site when I upgraded from 1.5 to 2.5 I just couldn’t be bothered with all that again.
WordPress as a platform had a number of really attractive things going for it, not least that it appears to be extremely easy to update from one version to the next. It’s certainly developed massively since we originally started the History Times back in 2010. If we’d stuck with WP back then rather than go over to Joomla I wouldn’t have had this entire debacle! Anyway, it all went pretty well, with minimal swearing, and the only real time I had to spend was sorting some of the images out, in particular the featured image at the beginning of each post. I’m not 100% convinced that the galleries are working quite the way I want them to at the minute but they work and do at least have touch functionality for mobile.
Talking of featured images, talk of the mythical German Job road trip has reared its head again recently and planning is afoot – albeit at a very early stage just now. Brad and I now have a shared Google map of all the places we fancy heading to as part of the route to / from Wolfsburg and it’s starting to fill up nicely – mainly with breweries and bunkers. What’s pretty cool is that the route is almost working itself out rather than us making conscious decisions on mileage etc. The timescale we’re working to is relatively vague (some time in the next 5 years), but he has small humans to consider and I don’t have a hugely paying job so I think that works quite nicely. It gives us plenty of time for bunker / WWII submarine research, and to save up for the fuel and merch bills which isn’t going to be cheap. There will be much merch!
Now I just have to persuade Brad of the merits of continuing another 140 miles to Berlin……