Category: Website News

Hey everybody! I just wanted to let you know that the jimcofer.com comment line has changed to a new, dedicated phone number. If you’d prefer to leave a comment via voice message instead of email, instant message or WordPress, all you need to do is pick up the phone and dial

704-800-1579

 

The comment line is available 24 hours a day.

NOTE: Long distance charges may apply. There are no fees to dial the comment line (it is not a “900” or “976” number), but your long distance carrier might charge you for the call. The jimcofer.com comment line is a local phone call for readers in the Charlotte, NC area .

It just occurred to me the other day that I haven’t given you good folks any information about how to register for my new site!

So here’s the skinny: you can leave a comment for almost any post on this site. But in order to do that, you’ve gotta create an account. Creating an account is easy – just scroll down the page to the “Meta” section in the right-hand sidebar. Click on the “Register” link, and you’ll be taken to an account creation page. All you have to do here is enter the user name you’d like to use for this site, along with a valid email address. In a couple of minutes you’ll get an email confirming your user name; the email will also come with a password and a link to login to this site (this link is for convenience only; it’s not one of those “you are required to click here to validate your account” kind of things). Once you log in to the site using your user name and password, you’ll be taken to your “Profile page”, where you can enter any contact information you’d like (such as your own website’s address or instant messaging nicknames), or you can change your password to something that suits you better.

From this point on, you can leave comments for almost any post on this site (by my decision, leaving comments is disabled for some posts). Note that all comments on jimcofer.com are moderated, so I’ll have to approve what you write before it’s posted publicly (you will be able to see your own comments, approved or not).

So… enjoy and comment away!

Ohmygosh! It’s finally done! The all-new jimcofer.com website is absolutely, completely done!

As I said in my previous post, you can click the Old Site Archive link on the sidebar to see any items from the old site that didn’t make the transition to the new site. Around 10% of the old site’s content didn’t make the cut at all and was deleted altogether – especially ancient Windows 98-era tips and some of the oldest posts from the first site.

In any case, WELCOME to the all-new jimcofer.com – I hope you enjoy it! I’m sooooo happy to be done with this transition – as I’m sure you’re sick of all the updates!

Have a good Saturday, everybody!

Hey everybody!

Well, the transition from the old FrontPage site to WordPress is almost complete. The old site is dead, and all links to it have been removed from the site. Around 85% of the old site’s content has either been moved to WordPress or has been archived; check out the Old Site Archive link in the sidebar for an index of older pages that didn’t make the move to WordPress put are still around in a stripped down FrontPage format. All I really have to do now is convert several pages from the old “Critics Corner” section to the Archive and create a bunch of posts from the old “Downloads” page and I’m done!

You’ll also noticed that I’ve tweaked the front page a bit. There’s now a handy “print this” link for every post, which generates a printer-friendly version of the post in question. I’ve also added the IM Online status widget to the sidebar; this lets you know if I am online via AIM or Yahoo! Messenger. If the widget says I’m online, just click on the AIM or Yahoo! icon to start a chat with me.

That’s about all for now. I hope to have the conversion absolutely completed sometime this weekend (or perhaps Monday).

Have a GREAT weekend!

Your Faithful Webmaster!

OK, make that two last things about the ongoing conversion of the site from FrontPage to WordPress:

1) I am moving items from the old site to the new one in the order that best suits me – from easiest to hardest. I also like to move them in groups. I’m not bothering to copy the timestamps from the old articles, so WordPress treats each “old” post as “new” and posts it on the front page. This means two things: at times, you may see nothing but recipes or “Geek Stuff” entries on the front page. Know that this site has much more to offer than just recipes or Windows tips; I’m just copying them over in a batch, so that’s all that there is on the front page at the moment. Secondly, you may see something that seems out of place. You might see posts on the front page dated today saying that I’m excited “about the Steelers being in the Super Bowl next week” or “going to see the brand new Matrix Reloaded movie this Friday”. Let me assure you that neither are your eyes playing tricks on you, nor am I hopelessly crazy. I’m just copying some old stuff to the new layout and the post was originally written a couple of years ago!

2) At this point, the entire old site is still online (look for the “Old Site” link on the front page under “Links”). However, in the next few days I will begin deleting old pages that have been moved to the new site, and I will probably create a new page in WordPress that has a clickable index of all the old pages that I’m not going to transfer to the new site. In other words, I’m going to move all of the old pages to a directory on the server called “old” and will have an index page where you can click a link to read the page in the “original” FrontPage format. Why? Well, look: an article about converting DVDs to MPEG-1 movies made a fair amount of sense back in 1998, but it’s old hat today. Why should I spend half an hour converting it to WordPress when no one is going to read it anyway? And some articles (while recent) are simply too time consuming to convert to WordPress. My “list of 62 great 80s films” article is only a couple of months old, but all of the links and tables would make it a pain to convert over. Unless I can find an easy way to strip that page’s HTML into something more WordPress-friendly, I’m just going to create a page in WP that has links to all of these types of articles. You follow me?

Welcome to the all-new jimcofer.com website! As you can see, I’ve finally ditched the old FrontPage site for WordPress. I know that some of you are already unhappy with the change, but I hope you’ll understand – the new site will be so much easier to maintain!

For those of you familiar with WordPress, this site will hopefully be pretty easy to figure out. For those of you more familiar with the old site, please check out these new features and changes:

Categories: If you look in the right-hand sidebar on the home page, you’ll see an entry called “Categories”. Many of the pages from the old site have been converted to WordPress categories. For instance, the old “Geek Stuff” page is now the “Geek Stuff” category. New “Geek Stuff” entries will be posted on the main page, but will eventually “fall off” the front page. To filter your results to “Geek Stuff” entries only, just click the “Geek Stuff” category. Most entries are posted in the same order as they were on the old site, so everything should be pretty easy to find.

New RSS feed: There is a new link to the RSS feed. If you were using the direct RSS link from the old site, you’ll need to change your subscription URL to the new feed. If you were using the old site’s FeedBurner feed, you will need to change to the new feed.

Pages: Some of the pages from the old site won’t easily convert to a “category” format, so they have been converted over to “page format”. For instance, the old “About Me” page is now located under the “Pages” link in the right-hand sidebar.

Continue reading “Welcome to the new jimcofer.com!”

OK, so… I never heard back from the folks at FeedBurner, so I just went ahead and set up a new RSS feed. If you are subscribed to the old FeedBurner RSS feed, you will need to update your clients to the following address:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/jimcofercom

If you were using the “direct” feed, you will need to upgrade your client to the following address:

http://jimcofer.com/personal/?feed=rss2

Please choose one of these two, as the old RSS feed is dead as of today.

OK, so… I’ve gone and installed WordPress on my site, and have big plans to convert the entire site over to it. Yes, it’s finally time to ditch FrontPage, so those of you out there who have given me grief about using FrontPage (and you know who you are)… you can now shut up about it!

I have no idea of how long it’s gonna take to convert the old site over (months, I’m guessing), so I’ll be running a “split site” in the mean time – just go to jimcofer.com and click on the link to the old site, and you’ll be able to get all the old info there. Nothing new should be posted over there, but you never know. Perhaps the WordPress thing will be a complete disaster. Or a smashing success. Who knows?

In the meantime… enjoy!