I’m still re-building my website at the moment. There is a lot to get back to bring it all up to date. It had grown like topsy over the years. Having been hacked meant that I had to get rid of a load of old scripts that had become easy prey for hackers.

I’m now creating a sensible structure to my site, nesting folders and giving folders names that mean something within the whole site. I’m also naming folders with an eye to the future, incase I want to differentiate files easily for reasons of gaining useful statistical information.

I’ve outsourced my blog hosting to WordPress.com bringing it into my site as an iframe. I’ve organised the Blog CSS so that is looks seemless with my site (www.shoorayner.com). I wasn’t earning anything off Google AdWords, so I’d rather have WordPress handle the business of keeping me safe and up to date. (I’m pretty sure that the hackers got in through my self-hosted WordPress folders). After couple of weeks I realise there are other benefits. Being on the wordpress.com site brings me viewers that I’d not get otherwise. My tags reach further that my posts. They trigger other pages to include your posting. I get different readers and different statistics about them. Before I had to wade through my site stats to make sense of the blog stats.

My site stats have changed radically. I could see the moment the robots and spiders found I’d changed everything. They went zipping through the new folders to bring their databases up to date. Of course it’s a risk changing one’s site. The search engines have you all mapped out. Now they are providing links that don’t exist anymore, so I’m getting a lot of 404 documents not found at the moment. These are coming from dead links on search engines and, sadly. dead links on user’s favourites. Those will have to build up again.

In the meantime, I have a much more manageable site that I’m now happy to grow. The site statistics make much more sense too. What is surprising is that most people want the boring pages. The fun ones, that take so much more time and effort, don’t seem to be appreciated as much. I wonder if that will change as time goes on and users begin to bookmark pages and the search engines take them directly to the pages they want. This time I’ll try to keep on top of the backup!